Summer airline travel: expect delays.
U.S. airlines are running way behind schedule — at a clip not seen for many years. Joe Sharkey at the New York Times has been hammering on this topic in his columns lately. Here’s his most recent assessment:
Flight Snags Are Arriving on Schedule
The nation’s air-travel system fell apart again last Friday night, when the space shuttle Atlantis was just about the only flight that was on time on the East Coast.
[. . .]
This year is shaping up to be the worst ever for delays, and there will be lots of blame to go around, and lots of finger-pointing.
Among other things, Sharkey’s article discusses the mounting challenges faced by the FAA as its air-traffic control system undergoes increasing stress, and the business opportunities being seized by companies like CAE, which makes flight simulators.
So far this year, the most famous — or notorious — airline delays have struck JetBlue, which stumbled badly back in February, when weather-related delays along the east coast overwhelmed the carrier’s vaunted customer-service network. Although JetBlue founder David Neeleman made an impassioned apology for the company on YouTube, he later resigned from his role as CEO.
Expect more corporate casualties — individual executives, or even whole companies — as problems mount in the commercial airways. But let me channel my inner Seth Godin for a minute: somewhere along the way, somebody (maybe Southwest Airlines, maybe a rejuvenated non-discount carrier, maybe an industry player as yet unknown) is going to crack the puzzle of making flights on time. Despite the FAA’s antiquated systems. Despite the routine nonsense of waiting on the taxiway for a gate to open up at overbooked airports like New York’s JFK. When someone figures out how to deal with the system as it is, rather than as airlines and their passengers wish it would be, and when they can convince air travelers that they really have cracked that puzzle, they’re going to have a real strategic advantage in the industry.
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[...] summer for air travel — at least, if you care about getting where you’re going on time. Joe Sharkey of the NYT and Scott McCartney of the WSJ have been all over this. Here are two recent samples of [...]
I’m not sure that even Seth Godin or Southwest or Sethwest Airlines could fix a system that is this broken. Especially if they want to continue to be competitive. The whole model depends on shoving as many people in the door on as many flights as possible. A new system will come, but it won’t be affordable to the masses for a long long time.
Hotel Guy: For the short term, I’ll be you’re right. (And I’ll be that Seth G. doesn’t assume he could fix it himself.) But that’s the funny thing about breakthrough innovations: there’s so much of a classic “entrepreneur’s gap” here that *somebody* is going to figure out how to exploit it, probably in a way that we can’t imagine now, but that will seem blindingly obvious in retrospect. Whoever manages this is likely to get very rich.
[...] reading into it, perhaps unfairly, is the millionth verse of the old campfire song, “Airlines Don’t Care about Those Who Fly.” Category: Good management and bad, The working [...]
[...] it a read. As I keep saying, someday somebody who runs an airline is going to crack this nut and make a lot of money while [...]