Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities | Hacker News Reader

Air carriers are still failing people with disabilities

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116 pointskynthelig129 comments

Disclaimer: I built airline reservations systems with ITA Software.

I don't recall there being a minimum character count for SSR codes, but in legacy reservations systems (and the passenger name records (PNR) that contain these SSRs) there's for sure a max. Airline reservations systems never met a fixed-width format they didn't like, and the reason is that for a long, long time the unit of storage for a PNR was a block on disk and disk space was precious, so every few bits (literally bits, not bytes) counted. Those constraints have persisted through the ages.

Upthread someone wondered about disrupting this industry. It is expensive (there's a lot of moving parts) but it's basically engineering and integration, with the integration being the far harder part. For example, to participate in the airline networks (the networks that send messages to other airlines to handle cross-carrier booking, talking to GDSes, control departure, speak to DHS, etc) you need to understand the meaning of various airline protocol messages. These messages have unclear semantics; one airline may regard message A as meaning "create a ticket for this passenger" while another airline may regard the same message as "create a reservation for this passenger" which are two different things. The only way to know what these messages mean is to get on the phone with each airline and ask. The documentation is wrong and outdated; the meaning of those messages is the outcome they have to that specific airline and not anything else. Oh and the network connection you send these messages over is a VPN that you need to agree to setup with the carrier you want to talk to. Airline messaging is the reason most modern reservations system can only handle small airlines, since getting the semantics, routing, and other details of airline messaging requires too many humans and too many business relationships.

Additionally, switching reservations system can kill an airline. Most airlines operate with a day or less of cash reserves so if the switch to a new res systems stops operation of the airline for any amount of time you could kill the airline. There's no incentive big enough to switch to a new res system since the rewards are not immediately revenue-impacting.

I know a guy with the last name 'Tester' that had to have a gate agent book their flight every ~10 minutes until their flight departed because the reservation system in production would delete any reservations with the last name 'Tester'.

Thought it was a fun story related to the immaturity of reservation / booking systems.

>I know a guy with the last name 'Tester' that had to have a gate agent book their flight every ~10 minutes until their flight departed because the reservation system in production would delete any reservations with the last name 'Tester'.

Jesus. Given that one of the Senators from Montana is named Tester, I would have thought someone would have been up the FAA's ass to get up their asses about this.

I think it was isolated to international flights on a non-us single carrier. Maybe the Senator from Montana has just been lucky?

In Ontario Canada, someone recently had trouble trading in their car because it had a lien from "Pebbles and Fred Flintstone". It took 9 months to correct.

https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2017/05/10/ont-woman...

> Most airlines operate with a day or less of cash reserves

Which airlines are we talking about? For cash reserves: American Airlines has $6.3B, Delta has $3.25B, Southwest has $3B, United has $4.3B.

How are cash reserves defined? AA has $6.3b in "short term investments", but $374m in cash.

Generally, highly liquid low risk things with a maturity of 3 months or less, for GAAP.

> Most airlines operate with a day or less of cash reserves so if the switch to a new res systems stops operation of the airline for any amount of time you could kill the airline

Was this true in 2001? How did they make it through the post-9/11 shutdown? That was about two full days without flights, then a few more heavily limited.

"Congress approves $15 billion airline bailout": http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/21/rec.congress.airline.de...

Indeed, but the drop in demand after the 2 day shutdown was more impactful than the 2 days alone. Demand dropped, and didn't return to pre 9/11 levels for 3 years.

In the early systems and I think that has changed the PNR used to be the hash of physical memory location of the booking.

Even back in 2002 most of the software used to deal with reservations was written in Assembler. I don't know if that has changed.

The six-character confirmation code you get when you book? That was the block address on disk of the start of your PNR.

Yes. The booking code is called the PNR. The passenger name record.

Indeed, disrupting airline-related industry is hard if you're an outsider. The technology is one hard thing, but knowing all the actors in the industry is the main advantage of GDSes.

BTW switching the reservation system is hard, but not impossible. Southwest migrated its international reservations from internal system to Amadeus this very week (after a lengthy development of course).

The farther I get in my career, the more I realize that relationships are often just as, or more important than the engineering in order to get a business off the ground.

This is true on a lot of levels. My therapist says that when a group is working toward a goal, there are two levels of operation that need to be managed. At the first level there's the way the group works together to solve the problem. But sometimes group members need to dip down to the personal level and resolve issues with the way individuals relate to each other in order to be able to focus on the original goal. Organizations composed of people that can't relate to each other are less effective because the personal issues get in the way of problem-solving.

> Most airlines operate with a day or less of cash reserves

That's kind of amazing, and kind of terrifying.

I also like the description of British Airways as a Pension Fund with a small airline attached.

A multi-billion pound deficit to be funded by a company with annual profits of a few hundred million iirc

Slightly off topic, but this is hardly the biggest blunder of the airline industry. A company I worked for last year absolutely tore them apart in a talk at 33c3.

In short, information like your address or passport number is easily accessible, and while it wasn't in the talk (I think), we were able to recover plaintext credit card numbers during the research.

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...

Speaking of tech failings among airlines... Can anyone tell me what the hell the ticket scanning machines at the gate are doing? In the past week United sent a French woman 2,000 miles in the wrong direction; even though her flight had changed gates, when they scanned her ticket at the (now incorrect) gate it did a normal 'OK' beep and let her through. What in the world is the point of scanning scanning tickets at the gate if it isn't even checking to make sure the ticket matches the flight?

Almost certainly human error.

Anecdotally, I had a standby ticket recently when my seat was reassigned to a paying customer, although I still had a boarding pass for that seat. I was halfway down the jet bridge before the gate agent realized that my ticket had been revoked.

I imagine it's second nature for gate agents to let passengers through, and one lapse in judgement can cause the United incident, despite the software showing that the ticket was invalid.

Multiple human errors. Once she was on the plane, she found (unsurprisingly) that her seat was taken. A steward on the plane looked at her boarding pass and found her another seat.

I bought a gift card at IKEA in Shanghai for 100 yuan once. Shortly afterward, I visited IKEA in Palo Alto and asked a cashier how much was on the card. She scanned it and reported a hundred dollars. I asked her to confirm that, which she did, and then she offered me a "receipt" of the scan, which I accepted.

The printout correctly showed that the card contained 100 CNY. I've thought of IKEA ever since as a store where the cash registers are smarter than the cashiers.

Is the cashier "dumb" if their screen reported $100?

It didn't, though.

I'm really surprised a Chinese bought IKEA card could be used in the USA anyways. These things usually rent transferable between countries.

I can't guarantee that it was usable -- I didn't try to buy anything with it, and for IKEA US to sell to me in CNY they'd have to have an exchange rate set up -- but it was definitely readable.

On the other hand, when I asked the recipient (it was a wedding gift) about it later, he reported that his wife had recorded it as having an appropriate-given-the-exchange-rate quantity of USD, so I suspect it was in fact usable.

Strange. This is then a sure way around Chinese currency controls, given that the RMB isn't convertible.

Interesting - the last time I tried to use their loyalty card ("IKEA Family"), it didn't work internationally.

I've built a few systems for low-cost airlines in South America. There shouldn't be a lot of difference with bigger airlines around the world.

The boarding software usually checks that:

  - The boarding pass is valid (checksum)
  - The flight state is correct e.g. 'boarding' and 'open'
  - The passenger did check-in
  - The passenger haven't boarded yet

More advanced implementations can match the gate with the flight, this is optional.

The beep usually is a response from the reader indicating that the code has been read successfully.

The result of the operation is displayed in a screen and the attendant has to read it and act accordingly.

> The beep usually is a response from the reader indicating that the code has been read successfully.

In Japanese domestic terminals, the gates are definitely more advanced - they play a different chime depending on your frequent flier status.

This is just a guess but I fly a _lot_ (~40 flights so far this year). My guess is that the software probably did its job, the gate agents are often just automotons and don't really check anything other than your boarding zone.

Even then, I often board with my coworkers who have higher status than me. If we're sitting next to each other and he's in group 2 but I'm in group 6, I'll generally board with him anyway and no one seems to care.

The system may not be aware of something like boarding groups, especially since every airline does them differently.

It's entirely possible that the "check" is "is this boarding pass checksum valid.", especially given the stories of boarding wrong flights - it doesn't even flash red for "this is not the right pass for this flight".

Depends on an airline and maybe even airport, I guess.

Anecdotally, last time I was flying on a business to Germany with Lufthansa, my cow-orker did the Internet check-in for me without me knowing, and printed out the boarding passes. I later did the check-in for myself again, and picked a different seat. At the airport, the friend gave me the boarding pass he printed (with the old seat number), and so I thought, let's check if it still works on the scanners. I scanned it when boarding, and the scanner threw up an error that the seat on the pass does not agree with the one that's actually booked. I pulled the up-to-date boardin pass on my phone and continued on my way - but it seems that there is some actual checking being done, not just CRC.

Higher status fliers are allowed to take guests with them into priority boarding. I do this frequently with friends and colleagues who don't fly much.

I have my friends do this when they travel with me. I tell them that if the gate agent says something, tell them you have a peanut allergy and need extra time to wipe the seat down. That line has worked every time.

"tell them you have a peanut allergy and need extra time to wipe the seat" Another often overlooked travel tip is that you can park in handicap spaces to save walking 10 extra feet.

A perfect example of a mild antisocial behaviour.

Makes me wonder if those are curable in humans, or are we doomed to forever not having nice things because of people acting this way?

Such abuse is why genuine, life-threatening allergies get trivialized in the public mind.

That's not a life hack thats deliberately lying to someone whose job requires them to accommodate you to sometimes great degrees. Like not serving peanuts to those around you.

That wouldn't be a global issue. Airlines each implement their own gate area boarding pass reader software.

So that's a airline specific design decision. It could be that for United, the beep indicates a valid boarding pass of any type, but a display shows the flight info...and the matching is manual.

I was wondering about that too. I once did the same thing. Went to gate 35A instead of 35B, scanned boarding pass, a person even looked at it. Nobody noticed until I saw the sign right above the door with the gate number so I turned around. What are they scanning and what are they looking at?

This is second hand info, so I can't personally vouch. But I heard the scanners at gates with multiple jetways (for example 35 A and B) have software that is set up to accept tickets for both flights. Not sure why you would board both flights concurrently, but may that was a desired feature.

There is also likely a human error component. When you make someone manually scan 150 people they stop paying attention. They should have some kind of error message, but if it looks like other error messages (like the ask about emergency exit message), it's possible the human confused the error and cleared it.

In some airports, airlines are essentially leasing gate space from the airport and any software the airline wants installed on the gate computer has to work in a very fixed set of constraints.

The shared gate agent computers are built from an industry-standard OS image (8 years or so ago this was Windows XP SP2, and not SP3, never SP3).

This is why exceptional cases require exceptional responses, especially when a human that is going to get fatigued is involved.

Don't just beep the same way every scan beeps, make a different noise. Show a large red "STOP" sign on the screen along with the problem.

When you need to alert a human to an event that only happens once in every few hundred cases, you can't be subtle.

> When you make someone manually scan 150 people they stop paying attention

Bingo. This is not really a job that people, in general, are any good at. If there was an automated turnstile that didn't suck, that'd be a great place for one, so they could focus on the exceptional cases instead of being lulled to sleep by the happy path.

My guess is that some planes can accommodate 2 jetways at once. One for first class/business, one for economy.

That is definitely true. 747's often have several.

Around 2005, they scanned my boarding pass and let me board a wrong flight. I didn't even check the gate properly as I was in a hurry but I found out only when I got to someone's seat asking him to leave because it was "my" seat.

In Europe they are meant to check the name on the boarding pass against an id such as a passport.

I believe that the reader just shows your name.

I also think what the readers do is update the system to say that you are on that flight. This is for revenue reasons. Tickets can be issued by other airlines, and the revenue is not counted until you are on the flight.

Also in Europe the system matches you with your luggage. This is a security measure.

It's also for manifest reasons. They need to have information on who and what is in the aircraft to calculate takeoff distance, power, flap settings, etc. and to account for everyone in the event of an accident or someone at CBP getting bored.

I've was once "rejected" by the gate-machine when I accidentally gave them an old boarding pass - however, this was on EasyJet, an airline which actually runs on 21st century software.

Is the beep notifying "correct pass for this flight" or is it just notifying "code read successfully" and the agents job is to check that the ticket matches their flight?

I changed my seat once after getting a boarding pass, and at the gate the scanner raised an error - so yes it does seem like there is some actual checking done.

Interesting. This may also be region/carrier specific I suppose. I've seen some pretty old looking consoles in smaller airports.

Mistakes like that can happen, since it depends a lot on the gate agent to check the information, usually at the same time they're helping people gate-check their luggage or print new boarding passes or work with standby passengers. That's the reason every flight I've ever been on has the flight attendant say "This is a two hour flight to [city]. If [city] is not your destination, please disembark now".

I was flying from Dublin once. They scan your ticket before security and at the gate, and use some sort of facial recognition to identify you in both places.

One woman was stopped as she entered the aircraft, as the attendent checking tickets saw that the flight on her ticket was for the day before!

Funny- this exact same thing almost happened to my sister a ~week ago. She boarded the wrong airplane (although the scanner beeped without any errors). Luckily, after sitting in the plane for 5 minutes, she realized that she had boarded the wrong plane. Her flight had changed gates.

Which gets at the real question.. what is the scanner actually checking?

From the numerous comments here, it's not matching the boarding pass to the flight or gate. Is it just boarding group? Is it that "yes, this is a valid ticket" or something else entirely?

Seems like an easy way to "disappear" - basically book a fight going somewhere, look around until you find a flight with open seats (Southwest would be best as no assigned seating), and then... poof?

> Which gets at the real question.. what is the scanner actually checking?

That's the question that's been nagging me since the day I read about this particular mistake. I wonder if there are any active public subreddits of airline workers; somewhere where I could hear a first-hand account of what those scanners are checking.

Cabin crew is supposed to do a headcount as well, so there is a good chance you get booted at that point.

In my experience, when I tried to board the wrong flight, the scanner served its purpose making an alerting sound and making sure they'd prevent me from boarding on the wrong airplane.

This was with Delta (both my intended flight and the mistaken one.)

Delta's IT is pretty decent for a large airline. Their scanners have little built in receipt printers. If you scan the wrong boarding pass (e.g. first leg of your flight boarding the second leg), it'll make the connection and pop out a little receipt telling you where to go. If your seat gets reassigned at the last minute or you get upgraded, you get a receipt giving your seat number.

Gates changes soo often it would be truly impossible to have the scanner check if you boarding correct plane. The mess would be disaster.

AFAIK, the scanner only checks "okay this is the airport you supposed to be inside within 48hours timeframe". That's all.

...and as the gates change the changes are reflected on screens displayed throughout the airport; it's not like the correct gate information is only stored in the minds of the employees working that day

If you suggesting or thinking the screens are somewhat connected or talk with the same system that the gate scanners are running on, then that's incorrect. Totally separate rail.

From experience I can say the Telco industry is exactly the same.

It would not surprise me to find any industry that has been around 40+ years will be the same - they want to spend time and money doing what they do, IT is seen as nothing more than an expensive nuisance.

Love them or hate then, that's why for example Uber & Telsa are so "disruptive" - they are focusing on the IT and the "Thing" (taxis / cars) is virtually second best.

This did happen in Europe with a RyanAir and EasyJet. They used a system called OpenSkies that was far cheaper to operate. It lacked lots of the of connectivity that the old systems have to Travel Agents and other Airlines.

Those companies are "disruptive" because they keep pushing boundaries and experimenting with new ideas. They are willing to gamble and lose, or even just spend money on an experiment with no known ROI. Kinda like Bell Labs of old.

The stock market has trained the older enterprises to stick with consistent returns. Don't rock the boat, don't mess with the cash cow.

"Exactly the same" only if you ignore everything about them that isn't consumer facing. Telcos are high-profit margin regional monopolies, whereas airlines operate at the margins and are fiercely competitive. Perhaps the only thing that can be said about them being similar is that they are high barrier-to-entry industries.

I meant "exactly the same" in the sense of the article - "letting old technology abuse their customers".

These old industries are dinosaurs in "the age of the internet" and have no clue what they are doing with regard to IT / Systems.

>Telcos are high-profit margin regional monopolies

Only in the US. Outside the US we have competition law.

Perhaps a disruption in airline industry is needed. Maybe one of those mega tech billionaires (Bezos, Musk, Page/Brin etc.) can pay more attention to this market and see investment opportunities. Such disruption would need to go beyond airlines and go towards plane manufacturers level. The fact that there are so little aircraft producers in the world, so monopoly actually starts from there and flows downwards at airline levels. Computing (for simulations), manufacturing such as advanced composites and 3D printing have advanced enough to streamline aircraft manufacturing. Heck it feels like we just ignored commercial airline market altogether and jumped straight to the commercial space market. If we have an advanced tech to go space exploring then I am sure we can bring significant changes to the crumbling airline industry.

Not likely to happen. It is a very expensive and difficult process to get a new airframe FAA certified to carry commercial passengers, which is part of why the Dreamliner took so long to be delivered. Couple that with basically zero margin for airlines and you have a perfect storm of "it's really expensive to make a new plane and no one will pay for it if you do".

There's a reason you see so many 20+ year old CRJ-900s and MD-80/90s at the airport. Airlines literally cannot afford new planes, and aircraft makers can't get new airframes through the regulator process easily enough. Boeing struggled to get fly-by-wire to pass FAA regulations, how do you think they'd fare trying to replace aluminum with 3D printed plastic?

The GA industry is running up against the same problems. Go to your local flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of 1970s Cessnas/Pipers. Recently there has been some push back against the FAA's certification programs due to the fact that MEMS systems are inherently more reliable instruments than gyroscopes powered by engine driven vacuum pumps. This resulted in some legislative changes and now you can (IIRC) replace many gages in old aircraft with newer electronic variants and not need a Supplementary Type Certificate (basically like getting your car re-titled to replace the tape deck with a CD player).

tl;dr: It's basically become apparent that too much safety is killing people.

> Go to your local flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of 1970s Cessnas/Pipers.

This neatly illustrates why: http://i.imgur.com/Un22IYK.png

It's not just certification, either. Product liability accounts for a large part of this increase: "Average cost of manufacturer's liability insurance for each airplane manufactured in the U.S. had risen from approximately $50 per plane in 1962 to $100,000 per plane in 1988." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalizatio...)

Yea, I'm really comparing two disparate issues here. The aircraft cost, for previously certified airframes, ie. the C172SP, as opposed to an SR22 or something, is almost entirely liability liability inflated while avionics are more heavily driven by certification.

This is why the experimental market is doing so well right now. No need to pay for either :P

Agree. Govt regulations can become a a major road block. As much good these regulations provide for the safety of consumers, they sure can prove out to be a hurdle for innovation when ill enforced. For example, I have heard from friends doing compliance testing with FTC for new hardware and how govt appointed contractors or their own employees literally go through thick books to make sure EVERYTHING checks out. Rules and regulations are good. But they can also be implemented smartly. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to work with FAA. For example, having a person on the floor doing manual stress testing on the airframe can be cumbersome and time consuming. Maybe some sort of automated solution involving a robot can expedite things, at least for the comprehensive initial check. Then bring in a manual person to do sanity check.

The history of accidents from well intended people doing the wrong things even when it cost them their lives creates a very different culture. It may seem wasteful, but that mostly the mismatch between doing something correctly thousands of times and doing it correctly millions of times. You can pay attention and do a complex things correctly thousands of times, but for millions that simply does not work.

If the medical industry worked like the FAA the jobs would be boring, and ~30,000+ fewer people would die a year.

Plenty of large successful businesses run on razor thin margins, however the airline industry is not lean. The internal waste is immense.

Source: Had an airline for a client, saw how sausage gets made

Same in healthcare. I work in one of the EMR companies, usually onsite at clients, and the whole operation is appalling in wasted human time and just cash wasted on stupid things.

Do tell!

I have one for our EMR: You can easily configure checkboxes, but not radio buttons, on an order form. Argh.

I don't see a problem with the aircraft themselves. Modern airliners are excellent for the most part. The parts that aren't excellent (like the seats and entertainment systems) are installed by the airlines after the manufacturer is done.

Musk has repeatedly stated that his goal is to get space travel to be like airline travel. Airliners, with their rapid turnaround and zero refurbishment between flights other than cleaning the cabin and refueling the plane, are the model he's shooting for with his rockets.

Essentially all of the problems in air travel come from the airlines, not the airline manufacturers. All of the problems discussed in this article are about ancient backend computer systems that don't get the job done very well, not the actual aircraft.

I would wager there is more money to be "found" by streamlining operations (e.g. better boarding and overall faster gate turns) than there would be in manufacturing improvements.

What most people don't realize is that an airliner is a $40-240 million dollar investment that needs intensive regular maintenance. Nobody gives a shit if you can shave 100lbs off the weight of the fuselage if you also have to replace the entire thing during every D check.

>more money to be "found" by streamlining operations (e.g. better boarding and overall faster gate turns)

FWIW, many ideas have been tried in this space. Assigned seating vs not assigned. Dual boarding through both the front and rear door of the aircraft. Charging for carry on luggage. Tons of time and motion studies. Nothing really compelling has ever come out of it, for various predictable reasons. The big one, to me, is that airlines are compelled to pack people tightly. Couple that with human behavior, and you're done. It only takes one person to hold up everyone else, because aisle space (as compared to seat space) doesn't make money.

Pilot friend told me we know exactly how we could make airliners ~twice as fuel-efficient by making the fuselage a more aerodynamic shape than a flat cylinder. But no-one wants to have to build each seat row in a slightly different shape.

Sounds suspect, as I think airlines would take the hit on seat design if it meant halving their fuel costs.

Richard Branson once suggested that "If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."

The airline industry is already established and low margin so it's not an easy opportunity for disruption. Combine that with heavy regulation and needing tons and tons of very specific expertise and I doubt any VC would touch most of it with a 10 foot pole

TSA would be the part to disrupt, and it's not like that was ever rational to begin with—people aren't likely to realize or admit it's mostly a scare tactic to fill jobs.

But as I mentioned, it's subject to heavy regulation and most of their job description in mandated by the government. Where the money is might be selling hardware to the TSA but that's probably a big risk

No, i mean removing or gutting the TSA by removing the human part would help everyone (but TSA agents, of which I know a couple—just another instance of automating away painful inefficiency, unfortunately, as they agree they're not doing shit to actually stop people compared to the machines).

Selling machines to TSA is easy. You just have to be Homeland Securty Chief for a bit first.

The European industry was massively disrupted in the last decade or two by budget airlines.

There's not only the western European companies, but even cheaper eastern ones like Wizz Air and AirBaltic.

That's true but it shows that the current industry already is driving down costs to rock bottom and is a bad target for the Silicon Valley style disruption, especially when existing players will just copy whatever you do

Maybe, but it is hard to do this. The are not a lot of airplanes made every year the global market is less than 10,000 per year and most of that isn't commercial airplanes. (Quick google says that General Aviation accounts for 5000 airplanes, while AirBus is about 600 and Boeing is about 700 - I know there are a few more makes not counted in the above numbers but this is enough to say less than 10,000). With production numbers that small you cannot get many scale benefits from producing airplanes.

If airplanes were as common as cars you would see little KIA two seat airplanes selling for $15,000. Honda and Ford would be a little more. But we need to ship a lot more airplanes for that to work.

The most likely disruption will be from self-driving cars. Trips under 300 miles will be more pleasant and almost as fast, or faster for shorter trips.

It's not an easy problem to solve. A very capable organization, ITA Software, was able to rewrite the shopping part. They failed, however, on delivering a new tech reservations system. Not for lack of money or talent either.

Google bought them for $700M.

What part of this article makes you think the planes are the problem?

As a wheelchair user (Spinal Muscular Atrophy) I can tell you the article left out one of the worst things airlines do. From what I can tell, they offer crew absolutely no training on how to handle electric wheelchairs (very brittle and expensive). I've flown ~22 times in my life and 10 times they completely broke my chair; stripped joystick, tire came off twice, cut wires (how?), electronics fried by some unknown liquid, etc. This has happened with AA, United, AirTran, and Delta.

edit: I should also mention that I even cover the chair in multiple layers of bubble wrap.

I wish I could just bring my chair next to everyone else. The standard seats are difficult to sit in for long flights.

I am also in a electric chair. Flying is a terrifying process. My cringe seeing the luggage folks carrying the chair onto the conveyor belt.

The worst part is that its not even bad that the chair breaks, its bad that at the destination your stuck immobile with a 300 pound device.

I rarely travel for this reason. The other is that a attendant/family member is required to come or your not allowed on the flight. I accept this but it still sucks.

The airport in Doha, Qatar is a silent airport. There were no announcements over the PA. It was an amazing experience!

I find the PA systems to be an assault on my ears and I often wear ear plugs in airports and on planes. I'd prefer silent airports. I suppose that'd be great for the deaf but not so good for the blind.

It just won't matter for the deaf, right?

It will matter to the deaf in a good way, because the airport will be set up to ensure that all information is communicated without using audio.

Exactly this.

I've had to scramble and barely make to another gate when they announced a change without making any visual updates. I only caught on when I noticed everyone being gone. (I was reading a book at that time).

I've had friends who missed flights because of these last minute changes. Even subscribing to text alerts is a hit or miss.

The non-disabled people have it bad enough.

Consider being 7 feet tall. You may split your head or get a concussion at the door or from things that hang down. The seats are too small; you'll have to sit with legs folded up and knees by your chest. You can't stand up in the restroom.

Consider being 4 feet tall. Your knees are on top of the seat. As your legs hang off the end of the seat, pressure on your upper calves is painful. You might be tempted to relieve the pain by kicking the seat in front of you.

Consider being 500 pounds. Your neighbors will be terrified. You might actually injure them. It has happened, causing nerve damage. You might injure yourself.

The headline is misleading. According to the information in the article itself most of the complaints can be solved by properly training staff to use existing tech as it was designed.

One of main complaints of the article - that airline staff doesn't get passed enough information about a passenger's disability, so, for example, deaf people get met at the gate with a wheelchair, seems to be a direct result of using inappropriate, or non-standard, SSR codes. If a deaf/hard-of-hearing person is travelling, the appropriate code, (DEAF), should be used, not HI or MAAS, (if the systems allow for multiple codes, "DEAF MAAS" would be appropriate).

According to the article these SSR codes are industry standards and are entrenched in airline systems worldwide. If they were used properly, and if staff were properly trained to understand and act on them, this problem would largely be solved. This is a training & execution problem, not a technology problem.

A second complaint, that information is not passed to disabled customers quickly, (for example, hard-of-hearing passengers can't hear announcements at the airport or on the plane), is also mostly solvable by using the tech that is installed in airports today. For example: "Visual paging — when an audio page is posted in text form on screens — is becoming very easy, but it’s not yet ubiquitous." Why is it not ubiquitous? Haven't most airports, at least in wealthy countries, got some sort of a screen up at each gate that has the Flight #, departure time, weather at the destination, and all that? If announcements aren't going up there too that seems to be laziness or lack of training on behalf of the gate staff, or laziness or lack of concern in whoever makes decisions about how the software that runs those screens works.

For in-flight announcements it's harder, especially now that seat-back displays are being removed from aircraft in favour of handheld devices. It probably comes down to a flight attendant making sure that a disabled person gets told what's going on, (because he or she saw the appropriate SSR code on the passenger manifest).

The final complaint, in-flight entertainment, is ridiculous. Why isn't everything that's available on TV, (closed-captioning, described video, and whatever else I'm not aware of), available on in-flight entertainment? The tech exists, it looks like it just hasn't been installed, or has been installed but isn't activated, on aircraft. This should not even be a problem and I don't understand why it is.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not disabled, and haven't experienced these problems myself. This comment is based purely on the problems as described in the linked article.

> (for example, hard-of-hearing passengers can't hear announcements at the airport or on the plane)

You don't have to be hard-of-hearing to struggle with that. A PA system that actually worked would be lovely at most airports. I can't remember a time when I was waiting at a gate and could actually hear what the gate attendants were announcing; it's either completely silent, like their microphone isn't even on, or it's distorted so badly by the garbage equipment and accoustics that it just sounds like the teacher in Charlie Brown.

If I were older or less mobile, I'd be even more incensed by the way airports seem to have such a penchant for putting up blatantly false gate information more than about 45 minutes before the flight is scheduled for takeoff. The last three times I've had to connect somewhere, I've gotten off my incoming flight, looked up the gate for my next leg, power-walked a half-mile or more to the opposite end of the terminal, or had to leave and go to a different terminal - only to get there, relax for a few minutes, and notice that the gate information has changed and now the gate is two or three away from where I started, and I've got to burn tire to get back there.

douche 10 minutes ago [-]

>> (for example, hard-of-hearing passengers can't hear announcements at the airport or on the plane) > You don't have to be hard-of-hearing to struggle with that.

That's the thing about accessibility improvements. They often improve the lives of everyone, or at least many more people than the improvements are meant to improve life for. For example: if you have to push a stroller, or are carrying a lot of things, through a heavy door, you can use the button meant to open the door for wheelchair users. You can probably even hit it with your hip if your hands are full.

This was my impression of the headline as well. The biggest issues had nothing to do with technology, but rather with people. I guess it's not as surprising/newsworthy to say "Airlines are letting their employees mistakes negatively impact their customers". And they seem to have made the conscious choice not to mention accessibility or PWD in the headline, perhaps because they figured the article would get fewer clicks from people who aren't interested in accessibility.

I wonder if websites have considered the impact that clickbait headlines have on people with disabilities. For example, someone who navigates a page with a chin mouse controller, or who has fine motor difficulties due to palsy, is probably even more frustrated by misleading headlines than people who can quickly open and close tabs. Not that this headline is strictly clickbait (certainly not the worst kind), but just a related thought.

> I wonder if websites have considered the impact that clickbait headlines have on people with disabilities.

My guess is they don't give a damn. They don't even think about it, because if they did, they'd realize the damage they're doing to all readers and the society at large, and they'd abandon their practice.

> For the first time last fall, the US Department of Transportation drafted regulations related to captions for in-flight entertainment.

This can't come quickly enough.

This and all the stories in the news show that the airline industry needs some serious updating.

For whatever reason, mainframe systems are so deeply entrenched, that all of the major Global Distribution System [0] providers seem to have their legacy systems wrapped in modern "serialization facades" to produce the XML or JSON that gets consumed by external systems.

There are probably a hundred ways to rationalize why. Inertia, lock-in, obstinate grey breards refusing to retire and holding infrastructure hostage until they die... , if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it-even-when-it-is-broke, "we can't afford to stop the world for your cargo-cult modernization rewrite, sonny...", too big to fail, on and on...

It's a pretty weird situation, but by my estimate, it's probably going to require totally new airlines rolling their own systems from scratch, in parallel isolation, next to the huge legacy carriers as they continue to operate, in order to transition, modernize and unseat the current technology. That seems to be the way things work in industries this big.

Fast food, banking, telecommunications. All of them have examples of modern upstarts that are now world-wide staples, simply because they started from scratch with more modern efficient systems, as they continue to co-exist alongside dinosaurs that still haven't gone away.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system

FWIW, Amadeus has been working for years and years on a migration away from IBM mainframes. The project took hundreds of man-years and it's nearing completion very soon (I mean, maybe this or next year, that's "very soon" in the GDS scale).

But as you can imagine, migrating legacy systems to new hardware with the spec "it should work as the old system" is not the most sexy job and not the easiest to recruit great programmers for.

(I work for Amadeus, but on unrelated projects - though I have friends who worked on the migration).

You can read more here for example: https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/08/04/amadeus-takes-off-wi...

> it's nearing completion very soon (I mean, maybe this or next year, that's "very soon" in the GDS scale).

On whose scale is this or next year not very soon?

>There are probably a hundred ways to rationalize why

It's just a difficult problem to solve. Many capable organizations have tried in earnest, including one Google bought for $700M. Thus far, the non TPF solutions can only scale to medium sized airlines.

It's not impossible, it's just a huge investment, and the payoff is lower than other potential uses of the same money. That's why all previous efforts stalled.

It feels like it's a classic case of where coming first can hurt you down the road.

For example, part of the reason the US is so far behind on credit card technology (just getting around to adopting EMV) is because the US was the first country to widely adopt credit cards in the first place and there's a lot of inertia.

In the airlines case, they were one of the first industries to computerize. Now they're stuck with the mainframes. Same thing happened in banking.

The credit card point doesn't make sense. The UK and Australia have very high credit card use, but both have had EMV for well over a decade -- I think the UK was first with the modern standard.

The argument makes more sense for infrastructure that needs upgrading, like Internet access, railways, sewers, water pipes.

That's silly. There's huge inertia in the US because they're all insanely profitable and there's no competition.

There is no reason the SSR codes shouldn't work as a solution. This is less about underlying tech, and more about specific effort to use it correctly to solve the issues.

We have to drastically reduce air travel to cope with global warming and excess CO2. It's pretty unethical to fly more than a few times a year. CO2 injected into the upper atmosphere causes 2-3x warming vs ground level CO2 emissions.

I believe the spectrums of IR absorbed by CO2 are already fully saturated, so that there is very little effect, if any, of increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

You're right, I misremembered. The 2-3x warming effect is due to other atmospheric effects ("radiative forcing") and nor direct effects of the emitted co2.

End result is the same however - the same fossil fuel is much worse when used in air travel than on the ground.

That's just stupid. There's way more to be gained by restricting cattle and cars than planes.

We have to it on many fronts, all the slices of the pie are small. Subdividing categories until you can say "this is too small to matter" is self deception. You just did it to the transportation sector :)

Air travel is growing exponentially, trend needs to be reversed: http://reports.weforum.org/travel-and-tourism-competitivenes...

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