For thousands of years, no human traveled faster than a horse. Napoleon’s armies were no mobile than Caesar’s. That changed almost overnight with the automobile and then the airplane. Despite that rapid progress, flight times from New York to London have barely budged in 50 years.If anything, it’s slower now that the Concorde is out of service.
That could change in the next 15-20 years with the dawn of space tourism. A spacecraft has to travel about 17,000 miles per hour to stay in orbit. A partnership between KLM airlines and a wealthy Formula One mogul hopes to make first-generational suborbital crafts that can reach 2,200 miles per hour, with an eventual goal of hitting 13,750 miles per hour.
This is good for more than space tourism — a trip from London to Sydney would take an hour and 45 minutes. That’s about the same as a flight today from New York to Chicago.
Caesar and Napoleon would be astonished. Hopefully this venture doesn’t experience the crony capitalism problems that NASA has had with a similar project.
As air travel becomes increasingly expensive or more inconvenient, travelers on the margin will choose driving rather than flying. For example, the TSA began requiring that checked baggage be screened in 2002. As a result (increased lines, etc.) total air travel dropped by about 6 percent. There is good reason to believe that the recent deployment of body-image scanning/pat-downs will have a similar effect.
The problem is that per mile traveled, driving is much more dangerous than flying. The researches estimate that in the 4th quarter of 2002, there were approximately 129 automobile deaths attributable to the switch from air travel to driving. Annually that would equal about 515 people. This is a non-significant number of individuals.
Do these new security features save enough lives to justify the real effects of American citizens deciding to drive rather than fly? I’d guess that there are numerous other ways where sufficiently similar levels of security could be achieved without hassling customers and encouraging them to skip air travel.
This is yet another troubling example of government safety regulations. The TSA was established to protect air travel. Yet if the only true result of their existence is to shift risk from the air to our roads, they haven’t actually made our lives any safer — while attacking our privacy and costing about $7 billion annually.
Via Nate Silver at The New York Times.
Photo credit: jello2594’s flickr photostream.
As of May 1, American Airlines will charge $8 to customers who want to use a blanket and pillow. JetBlue and US Airways already charge for them. This is only the latest example of a nickel-and-diming trend that has been going on for at least a decade. Passengers can also expect to be nicked for checked baggage, food, and drinks.
It’s also terrible PR. An unscientific CNN.com poll shows that 96 percent of passengers are unwilling to pay. More than that probably also harbor some resentment against the offending airlines.
Given how much customers resent extra charges, it is a mystery to me why airlines have so many of them. Why don’t they just include those expenses in their ticket prices? People don’t mind paying once. But if they have to take out their wallet a second or a third time, they often get angry. This anger is completely avoidable. Just put those extra nickels and dimes in the initial ticket price.
There has to be a reason why airlines so readily incur their customers’ wrath. My theory is that airlines think the nickel-and-dime approach can lower total costs. If people stick to carry-ons to avoid a checked baggage fee, that saves the airline some money. If they set the fees right, they’ll save more in labor costs than the forego in baggage fees.
Maybe they’re thinking the same theory applies to pillows and blankets. They’re on every seat in every flight. But most people don’t even use them. I rarely do. Seems like a waste of resources, doesn’t it? By only giving blankets to people who want them enough to pay for them, the airline has to buy fewer sets of pillows and blankets. It also has to clean fewer of them. If they’ve calculated correctly, this will result in a net savings. That means lower fares. And hopefully, more business.
I have no idea if this theory is correct. But it does make some sense.
But the fact remains that people are transaction-averse. Southwest Airlines has had great success with its concsious business strategy of keeping its nickel-and-diming to a minimum. While I personally prefer the Southwest approach, there seems to be room for both business models in the market. Time will tell if one eventually proves superior in giving people what they want. Even if it involves much grumbling, cursing, and reaching for wallets.
CEI Fellow in Regulatory Studies, Ryan Young, talks about the latest bill in Congress to regulate your carry-on habits. Find the article here.
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