I flew from Boston to San Antonio, Texas yesterday on American Airlines. I dutifully segregated my liquids (sunscreen and toothpaste) into a quart-sized Ziploc bag and put it in the front pocket of my carry-on. Then I forgot to take it out when going through the Logan Airport security line at 5:00 am. The 25 TSA employees present at the checkpoint failed to notice this infraction (liquids remaining in bag). It occurred to me that this has happened many times before. I have left liquids in my bag and the TSA folks have not harassed me as expected. Are they in fact enforcing this rule?
The second odd thing about the flight was that I arrived early in Dallas. Right next to the gate where I arrived was an American Airlines flight departing for San Antonio. As I was holding a valid ticket from Dallas to San Antonio, I asked if I could get on the earlier flight. The gate agent explained that they had changed their policy and would no longer allow anyone to do this except super double triple platinum award club members. So I walked to another terminal, watched a second AA flight depart for San Antonio (did not try to get on that one), and went over to the gate for my scheduled flight. They’d boarded the first class passengers already and then shut down the ramp due to a lightning storm. We waited for another hour or so and then got on the plane. I got to San Antonio about 2.5 hours later than I could have, at exactly the same cost to the airline.
I’m sure that this policy has a rational business basis, but I’m wondering what it is. The main advantage of a legacy airline, from a consumer’s point of view, is that they are bigger. I may not like the ancient MD-80 planes that American flies compared to JetBlue’s shining new Airbus fleet, but American might be able to get me there faster due to their larger fleet and more frequent schedule. Except because of this policy I know that I won’t derive any benefit from American’s larger size. I will have to wait for my scheduled connection, just as I would with JetBlue, Southwest, or Virgin. How is American benefiting from denying consumers the benefits of their airline’s size? I would naively expect this to hasten their decline in the face of competition from JetBlue and the other startups.
[The purpose of the trip was to help a friend pick up a 2005 Cirrus SR20 that he purchased with 780 hours on the meter. We flew for about 3 hours, just shy of Memphis, Tennessee, just ahead of a line of thunderstorms, before the main alternator failed. The Cirrus electrical system design worked pretty well, with the non-essential systems failing gradually. Thanks to the small backup alternator, we still had the primary flight display, a GPS, a communications radio, and a transponder for a landing on 18R at Memphis International. We shut down at Wilson Air Center where a mechanic came in from home to begin troubleshooting.]
The justification I’ve heard is that the new policy discourages passengers from buying a cheap ticket for late in the day with the intention of standing by for an earlier, more expensive flight. I don’t find this terribly persuasive.
AA is copying Southwest on the issue of not allowing you to catch an open seat on an earlier connecting flight when you happen to arrive early at your connecting airport. Southwest only allows this for full fare tickets (which I never buy), not for Internet special or “Wanna Get Away” fares. Whenever I ask about getting on an earlier connection, the Southwest agent always asks me to pay the difference between my fare and the full fare (which I never agree to).
So while it doesn’t cost the airline anything extra one way or another, you can view this as another revenue enhancing measure. The airline figures that if you really want to get to your destination earlier than scheduled (and circumvent delays like thunder storms), you’ll pay for it.
Perhaps it’s felt that raising the barrier to the perks from the airline furthers lock-in from the consumer? If you let just anyone on the earlier flight, then AA would be less distinguished from United or Delta, you’d just have the commodity big airline flight, and the commodity economy carrier flight. By making the consumer commit heavily to one airline over the other, and abandoning all of us who fly less to the economy airlines, you lock in the business travelers.
And, yeah, I had the same experience you just did with liquids in carry-on. I think that at some point the people scanning the bags realize that 99% of the procedures are crap and just ignore them. I mean, if those guys just napped through their jobs, what are the chances they’ll ever actually miss the setup for a terrorist attack? Probably less than one in ten thousand employee careers. They’re far more likely to get killed in an automobile accident than to have their TSA career ruined by missing “terrorists” getting on the airplane. And even then, what causes them to miss the signs of one isn’t something they’ve been trained to look for, so there’s absolutely no payoff for following procedure and pissing off the people you’re dealing with day in and day out.
My wife did have her laptop swabbed down and get searched, when we talked with the security folks about it they said that use of hand creams tends to set off the detectors. If you’re a terrorist, make sure your little clear plastic baggy contains lotion so that you have something to blame for the C4 traces on your hands.
Glad you made a safe landing. Hope everything works out.
Here in North carolina, there’s some excitement over Honda’s new aircraft. What do you think of the idea that a fleet of Very Light Jets might be the basis for an air taxi system, as mentioned in this Popular Mechanics article?
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4347867.html
John: Thanks for the HondaJet article. Every time a new light jet comes out, some journalist says that this will usher in a new era of air taxis for everyone. It was said quite a bit about the Eclipse, which was much cheaper to buy and somewhat cheaper to operate than the Honda. The companies that tried to do it went bankrupt.
The article contains a lot of wishful thinking, e.g., that the FAA and insurance companies are going to approve single-pilot jet operations. When you include the costs of complying with government regulations and paying two pilots, there is just no way to make private jet travel competitive with a 130-seat airliner.
I have noticed a wide disparity of security enforcement. I think it comes down to volume.
The difference between Logan and the much smaller airport at Jackson Hole is an example. This year, we brought our daughter with us, along with a 3oz containers of Motrin, etc. No issues going through the checkpoint at Logan on the way out.
On the way back flying out of Jackson, TSA saw the medications in the diaper bag when it went through the scanner, and tested the medications to make sure they weren’t explosives.
I think the bigger airports recognize that strict adherence to the letter of the law simply won’t work, and give screeners some discretion.
I think the re-book thing is a case of reducing the workforce so far that its necessary (in management’s view) to smooth the workload so that no reserve personnel are needed for day to day ops. If on-demand re-books were allowed, every early-arriver to a hub would naturally try it, stressing the pre-planned gate process and to some extent pre-planned logistics (a bigger problem back when a lot more catering was done). On Delta, a booked or through passenger requires zero interaction with gate personnel if he/she responds well to the kiosk and flight info screens/announcements. A re-book needs at least a moment of interaction and 20 or 30 of them might cascade into flight delay, plus resetting the logistics of the “new” and the “old” flight, perhaps requiring an extra flight attendant or surplusing one on the “old” flight.
The fallacy in the policy is that every flight has myriad opportunities to be delayed and delays are so frequent that the pre-plan is the exception rather than the rule on many (most?) days. Adding the “opportunity” of re-booking would be an incremental internal friction that actually increases customer satisfaction. Most customers would probably understand a limited window for re-booking (cut off 30 minutes before departure or such).
The airlines think they are making a trade off – entropy seems to be working against them. Good luck.
One of the reasons I fly AA is because I can do standby. It’s true that it is their current (dumb) policy to not do standby for normal passengers. If you go to the self-service kiosks at DFW, it would have allowed you to select an earlier flight for $50 extra. I recommend the kiosks because I had a layover at DFW and had to do something in Dallas and take the last flight out 10 hours later. The ticket agent/800 number quoted $500+ to make the change, whereas I went to the kiosk and was able to get a seat on the last flight out for free (I am an elite flier). It would have cost a normal passenger $50.
Folks who think that AA’s policy was an attempt to get more money out of me: The gate agent did not ask for money. Nor did she say that I could get on the earlier flight if I paid. She simply said that I couldn’t get on.
The day before your flight into San Antonio, I arrived early in Chicago on a flight from Europe. My final destination was DFW and there were two other flights ahead of the one I was scheduled to go on.
After a couple of failed attempts to rearrange my tickets using the AAdvantage call center I went to the gate where the flight before mine was boarding. Boarding had not started and there were about 10 people listed as standby. I spoke to the agent and presented my e-tickets. The agent said I can go standby provided that the tickets were purchased earlier than Feb. 22. Since that was the case, I was granted access to the coveted standby list and ended up flying on the earlier flight.
I got lucky and my checked luggage arrived with me in DFW. I was doubly lucky since the flight I was originally scheduled to be ended up being late for about an hour and a half. They didn’t ask and I didn’t offer any money or miles for this transaction to occur.
So if you assume that there is a rational business reason for their policies would imply some degree of consistency. However this does not seem to be the case, as this anecdote shows. I am curious, did you purchase your tickets within the last 3 weeks or so, or earlier? Does it make sense to play some sort of guessing game to try to figure out AA’s real policy?
My sense is that gate agents have discretion over standby requests at the gate and they exercise it as they see fit. Whether they reject your request with a bureaucratic tall tale or quietly let you go ahead, may be a function of local conditions more than any rules in particular.
gms: The tickets were purchased after Feb 22, but the gate agent did not ask to see the tickets or seem interested in looking up the reservation.
Jay: Thanks for the tip about using the self-service kiosks. I didn’t actually notice any. I used one to check in at Logan Airport in Boston, but don’t remember seeing any for connecting passengers in DFW.
I’m only mildly curious about why AA is doing this. I just figured that they would naturally want to take advantage of their larger size to deliver something that JetBlue can’t. If they can’t or won’t use their size to advantage they are left with competing on price (tough because JetBlue’s costs are lower), age of airplane (tough because theirs are almost antique compared to JetBlue’s), friendliness (impossible because AA employees are old, unionized, and crabby), comfort (almost impossible for economy customers because AA’s planes are so cramped for legroom compared to JetBlue’s). I hadn’t flown on American Airlines since April 2008. I probably wouldn’t choose them again unless they were dramatically cheaper than JetBlue.
Did you have luggage that was checked through to your final destination?
If so, it might be a security measure. In theory, ensuring that people fly with their luggage lowers the incentive for people with explosives to detonate it as they will be on the same flight. Being blown to bits deters all but the most hardcore.
My guess is this airline is letting super double triple platinum award club members slide (even if they are not supposed to), as they are under the impression if these people have a profile / history of having flown X numbers of times without packing a bomb, there is a high chance they are not going to suddenly want to do so.
Just a guess.
I had an odd airport experience just after September 11, 2001:
In that era of super-heightened security, I (a licensed helicopter pilot) traveled from North Carolina with another pilot to pick up a helicopter in Vermont.
We each had one-way tickets, no luggage and in our carry-on bags we had
aeronautical charts and aviation radio headsets, yet we were not given a
second glance by any of the security personnel. Yet I watched an elderly man suffer the indignity of having everything in his carry-on placed onto a rolling cart and scrutinized by security officials.
In my opinion two men with one-way tickets, no luggage and carrying aeronautical charts and communication headsets would seem to be more of a security risk than a 70+ year old man, wouldn’t they?
Helena: I did not have any checked bags. Nor did the gate agent ask about checked bags. If the concern were checked baggage the airline could easily verify that at the time of scanning the boarding pass. I doubt that this is the concern because someone who made a bomb that would detonate on the 2nd leg of a trip could easily avoid traveling with the bomb by simply walking out of the DFW airport and not getting on the 2nd leg. On domestic flights, I don’t think that the airlines go to the trouble of matching bags and passengers (they do try this on transatlantic flights and it costs them a lot of delays and money).
My own odd airport security experiences after 9/11:
I (then a 30 year old male) flew commercial airlines several times in the four months following 9/11/01, some business trips by myself and twice with my family.
Back then they were doing enhanced screening behind curtained off areas at the boarding gates. My then 3-year-old son was pulled for this on one flight. When I complained, the security personnel told me that the computer randomly chose his ticket number. I said that I could not possibly let complete strangers take my 3-year-old behind a curtain by himself to be searched. After some consultation among the security officers, they told me I or my wife could accompany him behind the screen, but the adult accompanying him would be also be required to submit to an enhanced search. What choice did we have? So my wife went with him.
I still regret that I did not have the presence of mind to tell the security people: “Fine, take my son and search him. But first I want to see all of your official IDs so I can take your names down. Afterwords I’m going to quiz him very carefully about whether anyone touched him in any way that made him feel uncomfortable, and if he says yes, I’m going to the press child molestation charges against all of you.”
Bags and passengers are matched on all US flights, foreign and domestic. It’s one reason your name is now printed on the “license plate” (baggage tag), so they can always do field identification if all the automated systems break down.However, they do have alot of loopholes to play with, such as sending your luggage without you if it’s more convenient for them to do so.
I’m wondering if AA does this differently seasonally. I know that in the winter UA seemed to really want to get people onto earlier flights at the hubs so they could to make sure that there was a surplus of capacity at the end of the days operations. This surplus would almost always get consumed by flight cancellations or operations delays and seemed a good approach to dealing not stranding irate passengers at ORD or DEN.
i seem to be the only one interested in the alternator. was it dangerous that it failed? was it unusual that it failed? it didnt seem like the plane had been flown that much in five years, or am i missing something? Do these things happen often?
If you were less experienced cd it have been a disaster? Everyone else focused on AA.
Elsa: It is not unusual for these alternators to fail. They are supposed to be good for about 500 hours between brush replacements and then 1000 hours between complete overhauls. The shop that does the overhauls said that in the Cirrus it might be closer to 400 hours of life expectancy due to the higher power of the engine and the high electric load. The plane has a second backup alternator that doesn’t have a whole lot of power but it can run the most important instruments, one radio, and the autopilot. So I wouldn’t say that it was dangerous or required a lot of experience or skill to handle. The fact that it was night time, with some cloud, and truly horrible thunderstorms moving in slowly added some pressure. The main thing that we had to do was exercise reasonable judgment. The air traffic controller wanted to suggest that we go towards Little Rock, Arkansas, which was closer than Memphis. This would also have put us closer to the thunderstorms moving southwest to northeast, so I pressed him about whether Memphis was a reasonable place to get the plane serviced.
Was 780 hours an underused airplane for five years old? That’s slightly more than average for a privately-owned little airplane. Remember that if you flew to Martha’s Vineyard and back every weekend in the Cirrus that would be only 100 hours per year of taxi+flight time.
The first startup airline willing to fly passengers across an ocean is going to put all the legacy carriers permanently out of business, I swear. That’s literally the only thing left that anyone would go to American, United, Delta, etc for…and then only because nobody else is willing to do it at all, except of course for the legacy carriers’ foreign counterparts.