Class 'Inequity' Fuels Air Rage | Hacker News Reader

Class 'Inequity' Fuels Air Rage

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32 pointsthunderbong46 comments

> The study found that just having a first-class section on an airplane quadrupled the chance of an air rage incident and that loading economy passengers through first class doubles that again

This sounds like a study full of confounding factors that are very difficult to control for, to do with sizes of planes and lengths of flight and different seating configurations of different airlines. And indeed there is a response to the original study questioning the statistical methods: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1611704113

On the wider subject, I’m a frequent flier and also have a few friends who are flight attendants. It’s a difficult job, and not well-paid. Please, every time you fly, imagine yourself in your flight attendants’ shoes, tasked with controlling a large number of grumpy primates packed into a long airtight cylinder for several hours, many of them intoxicated when they board and then expecting you to serve then even more alcohol. A little empathy goes a long way and I’m quite happy to see some draconian penalties for anyone who is physically violent on a flight.

You aren’t wrong about flight attendants but also big companies exploit your empathy. You aren’t ever allowed to see or communicate with anyone other than ill paid employees with no responsibility. This is intended to defuse and disarm your anger and frustration at the company—-whether legitimate or not.

eh, sure, but I don’t think it’s hard to make the distinction in this case. When something egregious happens with a flight, do I bitch at the flight attendants and take out my frustration on them? No. Did I make a huge stink to the airline complaints department afterwards? Yes. I don’t feel my empathy is being exploited here.

I agree with everything you said, I just found myself compelled to point out that the fuselage is not airtight (there are air intakes from outside, the toilet flush uses the pressure differential, etc).

s/airtight/pressurized/g then :)

Thank you :D

(I originally wrote “metal cylinder” but then thought, waiiiit this is hacker news, someone is going to correct me and give me a mini seminar on composite fuselages.)

At least you dodged that bullet!

That you for confirming that I am indeed reading a hacker news thread

Yes, also effect sizes of 4x and 8x are just ridiculously huge. I flat-out don't believe it. This study won't replicate.

Regulations say pilots have responsibility and authority over who they accept on the plane, one commercial airliner pilot did tell me he does refuse entry to clearly inebriated passengers. For this of course the pilot has to not be too busy, has to take the time to stand at the door for the whole boarding, and has to have a company that will not veto such (legal) decisions to refuse boarding, with associated luggage removal delay etc, to happen... How much has this changed in the past ten years?

Yes the conclusion sounds like the authors have bent some statistics to support their theory.

I fly frequently and have occasionally felt these feelings of anger but NEVER have I started actual boarding in a good mood only for my mood to sour as I get to my seat. The anger has always built up earlier.

To be clear, I'm not trying to refute the study by stating this fact. But I am suggesting that there are obvious other explanations for the observation. For example, the existence of a first class section is highly correlated with the size of the airplane.

Larger airplane size is associated with significantly more queueing - which are far more likely sources of "ragey" feelings. Especially queues which stop moving or are unfair - for example where you have multiple queues and you get put into a slow/stuck one.

I mean who doesn't feel a little surge of irritation, stuck in a queue, when someone is holding up a check-in desk asking a bunch of irrelevant questions.

Also larger aircraft (with first class sections) are more likely to be international which usually means passport checks/visa control - thus more queuing.

> The rates of air rage skyrocketed during the COVID pandemic, but most of that was due to the mask mandate. What's puzzling regulators is that it hasn't dropped to pre-pandemic levels. According to University of Texas researchers the ever-shrinking personal space available might be a significant factor.

It's so funny how everyone willfully ignores the elephant in the room: COVID causes serious neurological damage [1]. The shrinking personal space is a myth, at least in the timeframe we're looking at - airlines are flying whatever is remotely airworthy, no one sends a plane off for months of being reconfigured and upgraded (maybe except Lufthansa who have pushed their renovations so far that the aged interior is now seriously crippling their competitiveness). The planes are the same that were flying pre-COVID.

> Transport Canada says the bad behavior sometimes starts before boarding. Earlier this year it reported an increase in the number of unruly and sometimes violent people in the security lines. It's considering adding a fine structure for passengers who abuse security agents.

And that one is the second elephant: Of course people get unruly when they have to wait for delayed boarding, lose baggage and whatnot. During COVID many airports let staff go because they didn't have money, those people left the industry forever, and now they can't hire enough replacement staff - airports usually are outside of the cities, so long commute times, pay is shit, and bureaucracy is often a nightmare too(in Germany, everyone working on the airfield side has to pass a governmental, very extensive background check).

Fines won't work, not when many people have to deal with lingering COVID aftereffects and service quality is dog shit.

[1] https://theconversation.com/mounting-research-shows-that-cov...

I'm all in for class segregation everywhere, including on airplanes. In the "good old" Soviet days, first class (there was no "Business" as there was no business in the Soviet Union) section was in front and used the same toilet and entry door as the pilots and the crew, AFTER it was the attendant's rest section, galley, luggage storage compartment, and on THEN the economy section. So those "animals that are more equal than others" could never intermix with the rest and most passengers were not even aware the first class existed. Thus the impression of egalitarian society was maintained and industry/government elites enjoyed their flights with no annoyances (the Party elites flew private planes).

Showing median people what the upper class steals from them seems like a reasonable thing to do.

I think, there isn't any situation where it's so obvious.

One type of humans gets cramped like farm animals, and the other gets pampered like pets.

Might motivate them to work harder, right?

Or to be born into the right family/country/situation in their next life?

This sentiment just promotes learned helplessness. While the world is by no means fair, flying first class is achievable for any able bodied person living in a first world country.

The majority of the rich are first generation. It’s far easier to become rich than to be born rich.

How is first class stealing anything? Without it, there would just be more second class seats. Not more space per seat.

To start with, if there was no first or business class, there would be more room for everyone else on the plane ? It’s pretty simple actually.

Disagree. The airlines would just add more cattle-car seats.

Or worse, or there might be fewer flights since in general, first class subsidises the economy class on a price per inch of plane space basis.

We don't have to speculate about what they might do, as "the whole flight is economy class" is basically the budget airline business model (even though some of them have some flights that have a premium class). Apparently you can run an airline where the entire plane is cheap seating, and the outcome is the level of comfort and service provided by budget carriers.

Percentage-wise, budget operators don’t really skimp that much on things like seat pitch compared to mid-tier operators.

The way RyanAir operates is with dark patterns. They have very strict luggage rules. Everything is optional. Their booking has ambiguous wording, causing less-savvy flyers to purchase options they don’t need. They sell RyanAir lottery tickets (!) on flights.

It’s like playing a game that is solely fueled by cosmetic microtransactions. If you can/know to not give in to the various trappings, you get to play a good game for free. Except in this case the game is air travel and the win condition is extremely cheap airfare :)

I’m not sure I would call it a dark pattern, it’s the stated goal of the product. To remove as many expenses as possible, and turn as many things into paid options as they can. They don’t make any effort to hide this and the RyanAir CEO talks about it publicly all the time.

They’re no different from a lot of other budget airlines. The seat pitch is as low as it can go, the seats are cheap and uncomfortable regardless of pitch, and everything other than the seat is a paid extra.

I had to take a reasonably long Air Asia flight last year, and the worst part about it was they woke you up every two hours by turning all the lights on and making a very long announcement that the duty free cart was going to spend the next hour trying to sell liquor and terrible perfume to every passenger.

However on that same flight, one of the paid options was for an incredibly cheap add on that gave you priority checkin, priority boarding, priority immigration, and priority baggage. It was like $10 or something, insanely good value.

This is wrong.

Non-budget carriers provide are more reliable and they provide food service and arguably better seating and entertainment.

I fly economy on a "premium" carrier all the time, and it's a much better experience but if I crunch the numbers, I fail to see how first class has much to do with the flight going ahead or not.

When airlines were first created there was no classes at all, there was also more space and comfort for everybody. Also, the ticket prices for those seats were so high that any ticket was just as unaffordable as first class would be today. The creation of economy class is the reason economy class flyers can indulge in the luxury of flight at all.

The only no-class commercial flights that operate today are the budget carriers, and they have the least comfortable offerings amongst all of the airlines.

No. First class helps subsidize the rest of the flight. Without it, the other seats would be either even smaller or more expensive.

Do you have any evidence of this or it's your opinion ?

Half the time I board a flight most of the first class is empty or non-existent, business is usually somewhat vacant and then there is literally hundreds of people paying $1500 for their ticket.

If you do the math, the vast majority of the flight is paid for by economy.

I invested in an airline for years and they talk about revenue per square meter in various cabins during earnings calls and press releases.

Economy (excluding Premium Economy) is the least profitable for the space.

Without first and business class - economy wouldn’t be affordable to people

Per volume or per weight, first class pays more than economy. They’re subsidizing seats in economy. So by your logic, economy is stealing from first class, not the other way around.

Before first class, fewer people could afford to fly. Airlines adopted first class to lower costs for a wider range of people to afford to fly.

Either Freakonomics or Planet Money has an episode to cover exactly this.

There is some minimum volume that all seats must take up. I think the cost function is really about how much volume you're buying excess of the minimum. What would be interesting to see is how these compare when you look at the $/(volume - minimum volume). I'd expect that coach is already pretty close to the minimum.

> think the cost function is really about how much volume you're buying excess of the minimum

You’ll not be able to define minimum very well. It’s also not sensible to assume any volume flies free, since it costs to fly any volume.

The cost to fly the plane is paid for by passengers, and the cabin has a certain volume. The cost function is exactly based on the volume and weight used per passenger. There is no ill-defined minimum volume that costs zero.

No one said there is a minimum volume that costs zero. There is a distribution of passengers requiring different amounts of space. The airline basically decided on some minimum that will be big enough to seat some percentile of passengers. (Presumably, the extreme right tail will have to buy two seats.) The airline doesn't sell a quarter of a seat or a half of a seat, so it doesn't make sense to compare seats in a way that assumes that this minimum portion of volume could cost a different amount for different passengers. It can't be broken up, so passengers always pay for all of it.

I'm saying that we should treat this minimum as a fixed cost. The airline could outfit the plane with all seats at this minimum volume to maximize seats. Then, the cost of a seat is the fixed cost for the minimum plus the cost of volume excess of this minimum. We should subtract the fixed cost and compare the excess volume per the remaining price.

Would've enjoyed a randomized approach to this. A paper I like a lot randomly exposed south Africans to luxury cars and found increased support for reidstribution.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2763-1

First party to make FAA regulations on seat size get 6" more legroom and width wins.

That’ll probably bump up flight prices quite a bit and with the US not having a rail or bus alternative and basically commuting on flights - that’s not going to “fly” at all

All change to least cost economics involve cost rises. The question is what degree the airlines compete or collude on price. Price is already so mutable, arguments to the cost of seating changes beg questions. The same seat slot can be sold for unit cost or 3x unit cost depending. That strongly implies two things: firstly the cost-price relationship is mutable and secondly, the airline is prepared to sell seats at or under cost simply to compete, given other loading.

Airlines make huge profit off premium economy and business.

If the FAA didn't mandate a seat? I observe Tony O'Rielly has already indicated he'd fly standing, and put cash locks on toilets (both said in humour)

> Regulators have been relying on a punitive approach to stem the tide and some violators have been hit with fines in the tens of thousands.

Did it work? Because it’s not sounding like it.

the thing about punitive measures is that they don't need to work in order to be perpetuated; they simply fit the way the people in power think the world ought to work.

Heh, I'm not exactly the 'raging', more the 'eye rolling' type, but I can relate each time I travel in German ICE trains with a cramped full second class and empty first class (which is the common situation on weekends). Just getting rid of the first class would pretty much double the train capacity between cities (regional trains already either don't have a first class at all, or a very small section - which also is always empty anyway).

Same in the Netherlands. First class in trains isn't beneficial to 95% of the travellers. I suspect the hefty first class season tickets used by upper middle class managers and civil servants count towards keeping it even in newly ordered trains.

"the ever-shrinking personal space available might be a significant factor"

What, really? You mean, people don't like having the fat blob next to them overflowing into their seat, while their knees are mashed against the seat in front? Who could have guessed?

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