* The communications procedures airlines have in place seem so "1970s"
On a flight last week from San Diego back to Seattle, I was struck at how antiquated the airline industry is in some ways. For example, we were set to depart a few minutes early when one of the ground crew discovered that a small plastic piece of a door on the exterior of the aircraft was broken. While this represented no threat to the safety of the aircraft, the engineering team back at the airline’s headquarters had to issue an engineering change order and then fax the document to the ground crew so that the order could be added to the aircraft’s log book. As a result, the flight was exactly one hour late in taking off.
The delay in taking off meant that a number of passengers were going to have very tight connections. However, the flight crew could not communicate with gate agents in Seattle to ask them to hold the connecting flights for a few minutes. Further, while the flight attendants read off the list of gates for the connecting flights, they added the caveat that this information was subject to change, and so passengers should check the monitors in the airport once we arrived.
Perhaps because I’m so exposed to messaging on a daily basis in terms of the research that we do, the briefings I receive, my writing this newsletter, and so forth, that the procedures airlines have in place seem so “1970s”. For example, while I’m assuming that faxing the engineering change order instead of e-mailing it is mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration, imagine the time savings if a more efficient method of communication could be used. Having a secure e-mail or instant messaging capability would have saved valuable time, and cost the airline less in terms of reticketing passengers who might have missed their flights, loss of goodwill, etc.
Real-time messaging between flight attendants and gate agents could have ensured that passengers did not miss their connecting flights. A real-time communication system that could update departure gate data could have provided valuable information to passengers rushing to meet a plane. All of this is possible even with the extremely narrow bandwidth links used for ground-to-air communication.
In short, messaging technologies can provide real value to the airline industry and their passengers, value that today is not being realized.
