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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy to think that anyone could, at no cost to themselves, cause a large commercial plane to be turned around and wipe out maybe $1 million dollars of value from the economy; if you count fuel costs, staff costs, lost hours of hundreds of passengers.

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While the point is valid, I can't help but think about "A hacker in a restaurant", english version found here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hacker-restaurant-alexander-s... (it's not mine and I'm in no way affiliated with the owner/author of the page).

So weird to me that this blog post is on linkedin and clicking your link opened the linkedin app on my phone

Airlines have hugely benefited from moving travelers from paper tickets to the use of their phones, where everything is done in the airline's app. Even if a few flights get turned around now and then, that seems trivial compared to the benefits:

- No need to print/distribute physical tickets

- Check-ins via the app reduces the need for ground personnel

- They can push inflight menus, shopping items, promotions etc.

- Flight updates and other notifications can get pushed to your device

- Integration of loyalty systems like airmiles

- They get to track various user behaviors

Passengers have benefited as well. Traditional tickets weren’t quite like cash but they were a big hassle to replace if lost.

Paper tickets, yes. Paper boarding passes, no. Replacing a paper boarding pass has been easy since airlines switched to an electronic ticketing system where the actual ticket is an entry in the airline's database.

The person I was responding to was talking about tickets. I will print a paper boarding pass if I'm at home and I can print it easily when I check in in advance but I just do it at the airport if it's not convenient. (I don't like making myself more dependent on my phone than I need to be.)

That comment introduces some confusion with "moving travelers from paper tickets to the use of their phones" before giving a mixed list of benefits of e-tickets and mobile boarding passes.

E-tickets were introduced in the 1990s, and essentially all airlines were using them by 2008. They don't have anything to do with phones. Mobile boarding passes are a more recent development.

It is the only sane way to handle things like this and I think it is the reason air travel is so secure that most regulations and practices make sense.

You want the crew to be fully in charge of security. If they think the plane should turn around, it turns around. In the long term it is way cheaper to eat those costs then to start a whole industry about litigation for events like these, probably causing everyone to buy additional insurance etc.

You definitely don't want to give any incentive to anyone to "overlook" possible problems.

Wipe out 1 million dollars from the economy?? Au contraire mon frere they just added 1 million dollars to GDP!

This sort of thing happens all the time, just less obviously. For example in my city it's not unusual to hear that a major tram line is stopped during the morning commute due to a car driver blocking it inconsiderately or colliding.

Once amortized against successful journeys the overall cost per passenger isn't significant. When it is, that's when we start seeing liability moved to the instigator.

This train of reasoning goes to some very sick places very quickly. A more reasonable version of this is "it's crazy to think that anyone could be put in a position to etc etc". I.e. we live in a big complicated world - if an individual drops the production table, almost certainly something else was wrong besides that person making a mistake.

I don't think the parent comment is saying that this passenger is at fault, just that there is a lot of potential for abuse.

"upgrade me to business class or I won't remember where my phone is as we'll have to go back"

I was thinking more in the direction of adversary government/groups getting a few people to "lose" their phones.

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