All things considered, we are very fortunate to have a transportation system that is highly reliable and gets us to where we want to go in an amazingly short time. The travel industry is a complex one and there is a huge legacy of process, management systems, and technology that makes it difficult to be as flexible and nimble as we all would like. Having offered that perspective, it is still at times incredible what we put up with.

On Friday night I went to delta.com to print out boarding passes for a flight to Columbus, Ohio on Saturday morning ( to a wedding). I logged in and printed my boarding pass in a breeze. Next I was ready to print my wife’s boarding pass. Her reservation and seat appeared on the web page just below mine but I couldn’t find a button or link anywhere on the site to print her boarding pass. I called Delta’s 800#, stepped through the call center menus, entered my SkyMiles account number and PIN, and then waited ten minutes or so to talk to a person. I explained the problem and the woman I was talking with actually thought it was amusing that I couldn’t print out my wife’s boarding pass. I told her I didn’t think it was so funny and asked if she could help. “I will have to transfer you to the web help desk”. “I don’t even use the Internet”, she said. I told her I had been at this “project” for quite awhile and asked if she could actually transfer me to a person, not a call center. “Absolutely”, she said. “Are you sure?”, I said. “Yes, absolutely”. Ok, great. The next thing I heard was “press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish”.

After holding an additional 10 minutes I got to talk to a man who really wanted to help. “What is your wife’s SkyMiles account number?”, he asked. I explained that she didn’t have one. He explained that she had to have one to print the boarding pass. I asked why it was that I could have made her reservation, paid for it, selected her seat, and can see the result on the same web page along with mine. He said because that is “how the system works”. I asked if he thought it was logical. Eventually I convinced him that it wasn’t, but nevertheless, I had to get my wife a SkyMiles account number and password. Then I had to logout and the login with her account and then I could print her boarding pass. Elapsed time for this “time saving” approach to boarding passes? About 45 minutes. We got to the airport Saturday morning and there was no line at the ticket counter. Incremental cost to use the web site? About 40 minutes.

Was this a technology problem? If I could reserve my wife a ticket, buy it, pick a seat, display both reservations on the same web page, and even change the seat, then could the application not have designed to allow printing the boarding pass? What were they thinking?

Being a pilot myself, I feel confident in the men and women in the cockpit of an airline aircraft. Knowing a bit about the FAA regulations, I feel confident in the procedures for flying and safety inspections. When it comes to information oriented aspects of the airline industry I am much less confident.

The return flight from Columbus to New York left right on time and landed five minutes ahead of schedule. After the plane sat on tarmac for a few minutes, the captain announced that there would be a hold while they “waited for a gate assignment”. Someone knew for at least an hour when the flight would land yet there was no assigned place for it to go after landing. Could it be that that the flight arrival system and the gate scheduling system do not communicate? The lack of systems and applications integration becomes so painfully obvious as our expectations about could be done increase. We sat on the tarmac for fifteen minutes before being assigned to a “parking place” where we deplaned and got on a bus to the terminal. The bus pulled up near a door and then we waited five minutes for someone to open it. Another information breakdown? Perhaps the person was overworked and busy managing another flight or something but you certainly get the feeling that better information flow could make the airplane and people “flows” work better.

Note: Japan Airlines uses message queuing technology to enable their flight arrival system and their gate scheduling system to communicate. Message queuing technology can enable two (or more) incompatible systems to exchange messages so that things can be coordinated.

I am sure all my readers could top the boarding pass and tarmac stories with their own version at Delta or any of the other airlines. I doubt if anyone could top the Fire Truck incident though! In that story I described how the American Airlines system took hours to be able to update their display boards and web sites with information that was in one of their systems.

Gregory King wrote and commented on my musing about how Flight Tracker could have more current flight information than American Airlines did. He pointed out that Flight Tracker simply received the real-time FAA data (a streaming feed called ASDI) and presents it as 3-minute snapshots.

Gregory claims that American Airlines “as a sales/service organization concerned with customer perception, has elected not to use that raw data as the basis for what it tells its customers”. He had a similar experience to mine last week where a Delta departure was still listed as “on-time” just 50 minutes before the scheduled time, even though the inbound aircraft had yet to land. He adds that there was “no way that they could land, de-plane the passengers from a full 767, refuel, clean, cater, and re-board a full 767 in less than 50 minutes”.

“I knew that, the gate agents knew that, the Crown Room employees knew that, but the monitors still showed on-time, as did the 800 number”. He said, “it wasn’t for another 30 minutes until they finally updated the monitors, and even then, if you take a good look, you will see that the flight status for all on-time flights has ON-TIME in all caps, bold, on the display, whereas the delayed flight simply shows the new time. No “DELAYED” or “LATE” in equally big letters”.

It may seem Machiavellian, but Gregory believes that “had they displayed the delay information earlier, some passengers may have taken the opportunity”, (as I did in my Fire Truck incident), “to switch to another carrier. The longer the carrier delays the announcement, the less time a customer has to select an alternate carrier”.

Note: There are a number of companies providing flight tracking services. Here are a few links — thanks to Gregory.

The flight tracker which I used: RLM Software flightview.com

Another player in the same space: FlyteComm flytecomm.com

Traffic Flow & Enterprise Management at FAA: faa.gov/