No Surprise

Some time ago I noted in this space the passage of a new Federal law intended to keep airlines from stranding passengers on the tarmac without food or water (or anything else) for long periods of time – a practice that even the most casual observer could have predicted would eventually cause trouble. It’s not that scheduling or dispatching functions for a transportation company the size of an airline are easy; obviously they’re not. It’s just that the practice of using a plane parked on the tarmac as a low-cost alternative to renting extra gates at a terminal is the sort of thing that saves the company money at their customers’ expense – which means that people are going to start agitating for regulation to prevent it as soon as it becomes a significant inconvenience. Unfortunately, the response to the regulations are equally predictable…

With the new “Three-hour” laws set to take effect in a couple of months, more and more airlines have begun cancelling flights instead of applying the familiar tarmac holds, according to this story from UPI online. With a three-hour violation potentially costing as much as $2.75 million for a medium-size airplane (100 passengers aboard) and a cancellation being effectively free, it would probably be difficult to find a single individual anywhere who would be surprised by this. A much more interesting question is what the next round in this war will be – assuming there is one…

Realistically, there is no way to determine which flights are cancelled because of matters beyond the airline’s control – weather, equipment malfunctions, lack of qualified personnel to operate the aircraft, lack of small lemon-soaked napkins for passenger hygiene – and which ones are caused because the company does not wish to pay for an extra gate fee, and would rather inconvenience 100 people than pay a hefty fine. Even if you could somehow pass a law about this issue, there would almost inevitably come a confrontation when some over-eager TSA type insists that the airline has to take off, the airline says the plane isn’t safe, the law enforcement personnel insist, and the plane crashes. But replacing one practice where the company makes money at the expense of its passengers with another is unlikely to end well, either for the airline or the customers…

In the end, this will probably be yet another opportunity for high-volume carriers like Southwest to gain a competitive advantage over their more conventional competitors. Southwest isn’t that much better about cancelled flights – they have all of the same reasons to scrub a takeoff that everyone else does. But if they become the only airline that does not suddenly show a massive increase in cancelled flights after the 29th of April of this year, when the new law goes into effect, it shouldn’t take much effort for them to capitalize on the situation. The major carriers would be well advised to look for another strategy…

In the case of the much-reviled baggage fees, the major carriers had a simple solution available to them from the beginning – leave the baggage alone, raise the cost of the flight enough to cover the increase in fuel costs or CEO salaries or whatever it is they’re trying to make up the cost of, and then proclaim to the world that they haven’t introduced any new fees. The increase in cost would be minimal on longer and more expensive flights ($25, the cost of a single bag fee, is not a large incremental increase on a $400 expense), and the airlines are already losing the fare wars to no-frills carriers like Southwest. Maybe there’s a similar fix possible in this case; maybe if they applied intelligence and creativity, the major carriers could find a solution that saves them money WITHOUT sticking their customers with the bill…

Of course, if they could use intelligence and creativity to solve problems, they’d never have gotten themselves into this situation in the first place…