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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

The idea that padded schedules leave airlines with no reason to be efficient is idiotic. It’s a heavily capital-intensive industry with razor-thin margins that has historically been a bad place to make money. There’s even a classic joke about it: “How do you make a small fortune in the airlines? Start with a large fortune.”

This is the industry that generated the famous story where American saved $40,000/year by going from two olives to one in their in-flight salad. United saved $300,000/year by printing their magazine on lighter paper. If you work at an airline and find a way to shave off a dime in fuel costs per flight, you’ll get articles written about you. And we’re supposed to believe that these companies don’t care about wasting fuel now that their schedules are padded out a bit?

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The iead that airlines have no reason to be efficient in it of itself is idiotic. It is an incredibly competitive industry, and the lengths to which airlines go to explore every possible margin is enough testament of that.

To add to your list of examples. KLM, for instance, was one of the first to introduce a system that would allow certain flight data to be uploaded into the flight computer as opposed to be requiring the pilots to enter it by hand. Other than fewer errors, they touted potentially saving pilots a couple minutes of data entry as one of the chief gains of the system.

I generally avoid the word "idiotic", but it fits here. Can we flag articles for stupidity?

Article tl;dr -- Airlines used to get from airport to airport faster. Airlines used to be late a lot of the time. Airlines increased their estimated flight times in order to achieve higher on-time percentage. The reason they did this instead of just being faster is that they love using more fuel.

I'm not anywhere near the airline industry myself. The next time I see misreporting on my own company or industry I'll look back at this and remind myself it could be worse.

The increased the time so that they won’t be fined for not being on time.

How does that reduce costs, though?

perhaps a minute or two less of running the engines?

Switching to ipads for the pilots resulted in saved fuel costs as well (yet another article). The populist notion that corporations are just evil things out to do stupid things really clouds rational thought. :(

Yes, in reality, corporations are evil things trying their best to be smart!

> The populist notion that corporations are just evil things out to do stupid things really clouds rational thought. :(

That's not the populist notion on corporations at all. The populist notion is that corporations' incentive structure, set by their board/leadership, causes them to act at the expense of rank and file workers and consumers.

That's very different than "evil" or "stupid".

It is still misguided. The idea of capitalism works because everyone is acting in their self-interests all the while everyone benefits from each other's work. The first thought that should come to mind where you see a corporation that's successful is that many people choose to do business with it and therefore it is generating them plenty of value.

Man solves all problems by pretending there simply are none

Corporations are not an emergent property of the universe.

They are models, specifically sanctioned by law, that are organized around particular sets of interests.

Just because there are subsets of people whose self-interest is aligned with particular corporations' doesn't mean that those interests are aligned with the self interest of everyone, or even a majority of people.

And this isn't to say that there isn't an important role for corporations to play in the world, but to suggest that their form and function is the result of everyone acting in their self interest is oversimplifying things dramatically.

>There’s even a classic joke about it: “How do you make a small fortune in the airlines? Start with a large fortune.”

"The secret to become millionaire is to be a billionaire and buy an airline"

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