I don't understand why passengers would become upset over a $1 charge to change their reservation. I recently tried to make a change to my reservation with Continental, and they wanted to charge me a $100 fee to change it, plus I would have to make up the difference in fare. But, I do see your point. Some people will become irate over a penny.

 

Dude, 30 grand is NOTHING to an airline. I could **** that amount away in less than a month in Jet A if I wanted to. Now getting the crews motivated to single engine taxi, or fly optimum altitues and reduce to econ speeds if you have a screaming tailwind, those are the things that will really save money. Yet management won't take more than token steps to do those things because it requires them to actually show leadership and motivate employees. It's far easier to cut something than it is to grow something.

 

I completely agree with that statement. I am actually kind of interested in this topic. I have been on a few planes that have single engine taxied (An hour delay from initial taxi to takeoff, and pulling into the ramp before a gate was available). But I know that not all pilots do this. What are the benefits and drawbacks of single engine taxiing? Is it real tough to keep straight? Do you save a significant amount of fuel?
Can aircraft like the 747 and MD-11 only use one engine on each wing and taxi and save fuel?


I also have one thing to add to mikes comment that can save fuel. How about asking for and taking shortcuts in the air? Some pilots do it all the time, and some pilots turn it down even when ATC offers it to them.

 

Drawbacks include slower acceleration and more jetblast when getting the aircraft moving from a stop. Fuel burn must be managed if using a wing tank.
An APU should be running as a backup source of power and air.

No.

On a long taxi, yes.

Yes.


Sometimes, a direct route costs fuel by encountering unfavorable winds or a turbulent area which your dispatcher had planned for you to avoid.

 

Let me put a passenger's perspective on some of the points raised.

When you can fly to 800-900 miles to Chicago for half the cost and 1/10th the time, you can't expect much. But I don't think simple courtesy and a complimentary soda is going overboard. I won't repeat my other postings relating the absolute crap service I've received on most of the legacy airlines. To be fair, a good portion of it was driven by bean counting measures.

Paying for meals in coach on intermediate length flights? I don't have a problem with that, as long as the food is decent; but, too often it is not. Pay for drinks (alcoholic) in coach, not a problem. But paying for a gin and tonic and being told lemons/limes didn't come with anymore; well, that smacks of making the airline's problem mine. I don't like it.

Raising fares across the board and keeping them there by everyone doing it? Well depending on how that's structured; that's either collusion/price fixing or re-regulation. Ask Howard Putnam and Bob Crandall how that worked for them at Braniff and American. Of course, one of them snitched, so it didn't pan out.

Ticket change fees? I was flying from MSP-RDU on a legacy carrier and moved my date one day earlier. $25 change fee, $50 change fee? No-they wanted $100 more than it cost for me to purchase a one-way next day ticket from MSP-MDW on American Trans Air, get off, collect my bag, check in on Southwest, go through security, and fly from MDW-RDU. I am a Million Miler flyer on that airline; but I told them they could take their seat and sell it to somebody else (my language was probably a little more harsh). I saved a $100 (more on principle than anything else) and they got to sell the seat again. But they trashed a lot of loyalty; almost all of it. I've only flown them once since.

Frequent flyer miles? Why bother- you can't get a seat on a flight anywhere, anytime hardly (with Southwest being an exception-although they have blackout dates). The airlines themselves devalued them so much they are worth nothing to most people- so they don't breed the loyalty they did, yet they are a huge potential financial burden (or perhaps write-off).

I got a hoot out of the pilot cruising this board looking for the cheapest flight to Florida- nobody vilified him for trying to save some money, but boy when your customers do that, we're screwing your company.

Solutions-

1. Try to keep your employees happy and that'll get back to your customer. Clearly, a lot of airlines need help here (perhaps I can start a consulting gig, hmmmmm).

2. Focus on the customer.

3. Be competitive in smart ways- not cheap ways.

It's a shame for me. I've loved aviation all my life and could probably be accused of being a wannabe (although, beleive me, this board has provided the cure for that!). Service where it is; I either really need to take the trip and/or it has to be over a 10 hour drive before I fly. And you know what, I'm not really missing it that much.

That's my two cents.

OldAg

 

OldAG,

Well said...

 

It has been common practice of crews to use less than all engines to taxi depending on ramp weights. In certain situations, it may be necesasary to start both engines on on a two engine aircraft. Once out of the congested ramp area where minimal turns are required, an engine is shut down. This saves a considerable amount of fuel at congested airports such as ORD, JFK, LAX, IAH, etc. Once after landing and the engines have cooled sufficiently, usually three minutes, one engine would be shut down. Since the aircraft is of at lower weights, and if delays getting on the gate are experienced, less power is required to get it moving to the gate.

I don't want to say that dispatchers don't care about the least time, versus lease distance route, but further analysis by them could result in fuel savings as well, reviewing winds, ISA deviation, thunderstorms, congested routes, etc. Also accurate projections in SIDS and STARS to be flown to ensure more accurate fuel burns would be helpful too.

 

Having worked as a real estate agent, I can thoroughly assure you that at least 10% of the population would become irate over a penny. I recently sold a $250,000 house, in almost flawless condition, and the client insisted that I put a $10 concession clause in the contract to buy because he wanted to buy a new flap for the toilet because it had a lazy flush.

Here is someone spending 250k (and he was already getting $5,000 in concessions paid to him at closing) and he was upset over $10. This isn't the first time this has happened, either. If someone is going to get worked up over $10 on a $250,000 purchase, I can only imagine what would happen if people had to pay a ten dollars extra or dollar to check a bag. This is definitely something that all of the airlines would have to do for it to work.

 

I can understand where this guy is coming from. I've mismanaged so much money in my life that I swore no one else would get over on me with a bad financial deal. It's all about perceptions. Then again, he could be a fellow Dave Ramsey listener.

 

It's the Democrats. More specifically, Al Gore, for inventing the internet.

One of the major problems with the airlines is that they can't and won't act as a group that controls their industry. As an example: when the price of oil goes up, even a few cents, per barrel, the oil companies immediately raise their at-the-pump prices. Immediately. All of them. Every last one. When the price of a barrel goes down, the oil companies, again, all of them, take their sweet time in lowering their at-the-pump and home heating oil prices.

The airlines can't get together on an issue that's killing them. I believe the primary reason is that each in turn is afraid that if they raise their prices, even a buck or two, they will not show up as the price leader, when someone does a low-cost fare search on the internet. This mentality, while tragic, is so crazy, as to be laughable. In effect, what it does is make it unprofitable for airlines to carry people. After 9-11, they would have been better off by stopping their flight schedules, and sending all their employees home, and just sending them their paychecks, each month. It would have taken them much longer to deplete their financial resources.

As well, there is no consistency of pricing, even within the same airline. You can be on a plane, where almost everyone has paid a different price for their ticket. I sort of understand the logic behind this phenomenon, but am still a little confused. It would seem to me that if an airline has a 120 seat jet, leaving (as an example) Chicago for Los Angeles, next Wednesday, and they have 90 seats sold, that as the clock ticks down to departure time, the value of those seats would become less and less. The reason being, if the seat can't be sold, they still have to be transported. Wouldn't it make more sense to sell that ticket for a reduced price, than to leave it empty? Instead, it's the reverse. If you buy a ticket the day before, it's at a higher price than if you had bought it two weeks ago. Makes no sense. The plane is still going to go.

One of the reasons the cargo carriers have done so well in this Post 9-11 environment is that they assign a fuel surcharge, thereby defraying the added cost of operating that jet. The interesting thing is that their customers understand this and continue to use the service. If the commercial carriers had done that from the get-go, I believe they wouldn't have had to take their drastic actions against their employee groups. Plain and simple.... their management doesn't have the hutspah.