It turns out that this has been studied quite a bit. You need to walk halfway across the airport because it reduces the amount of time you eventually stand staring at the belt waiting for your bag, and most people prefer "occupied time" (e.g., walking halfway across the airport) to "unoccupied time" (e.g., waiting at a baggage claim right next to the flight).
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting...
- Drive to SJC. Park in lot next to terminal about 100 feet from PSA station.
- Walk into adjacent PSA terminal section. Pay $14 in cash to clerk. No reservation needed. Register receipt is boarding pass.
- The hourly B-727 pulls up outside and lowers rear stairs. Passengers get on with carry-on luggage.
- 58 minutes flight time to LAX.
Which is a travesty. This makes absolutely zero sense, even after Econ 500 level classes I took a decade ago. It's greed, plain and simple.
It sucks from the customer perspective - in particular, if you have a sudden illness or death in a family member, the last thing on your mind should be how the airline is about to fleece you. International airlines often have bereavement fares for these situations, but US domestic carriers view it as a profit opportunity. It's often a double-whammy because your travel schedule is often unpredictable in these cases and most airline don't allow flight changes without huge penalties.
Interestingly, I've heard that plane tickets often drop significantly in price if you book really close to departure (eg. < 1 day out). Never tried it, and I don't see it in a quick spot check of the Internet, but it makes sense from an economic perspective - the seat is otherwise going to go unfilled, so any money is better than no money.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2016/07/death_in_the_family...
Why? But in any case, you could have a fast conveyor belt directly from the plane to the location, no need to carry them by hand.
It's mostly a problem of scale. Unloading 20 bags in the 5 minutes or so before the passengers start to deplane is no problem. Unloading 500 bags would be.
5.) When I get off the plane, hand my luggage directly to me
Maybe the idiots have more in common with you than you think?
If you're not willing to fix 2 and 5, as well as airlines losing, misdirecting, or mishandling/damaging luggage, then you will get people like me who refuse to ever check a bag. I'd like everything I bring with me to show up, intact, and not have to wait on baggage at the other end, so I carry it with me. (I do, however, make sure it fits well within the specified carry-on dimensions, so I never have problems fitting it easily into the overhead bin.)
I don't mind gate-checked bags as much; that solves every problem except for damaged/mishandled luggage, and in particular I know I can simply pick up the bag directly from the cart on the tarmac when I get off the plane. That only tends to happen for tiny planes, though, and I don't know that it'd scale to a 400-person flight.
Personally, I'd like to see a solution that involves finer-grained boarding. Don't board a dozen rows at a time; board in outside-in order, so that everyone walks directly to the correct row, loads their luggage in parallel without blocking anyone, and sits down in parallel.
People with less money than you = idiots. Nice sentiment to have ????
For business travelers, it's not about the money. Most of us get free checked bags because of airline status anyway. It's about time. I just wish not everyone, however able-bodied, felt compelled to use the rigid roller bags that take up so much room even for a 1 night trip.
When I was living in Beijing, I would do a few transpacific flights a year. Even Seattle was 12 hours away...
Supersonic flights make total sense for long hauls...it could make places like Australia or New Zealand "much closer" and less isolated.
Given that you are flying mainly short hauls, this isn't a feature designed for you.
Amtraks have a lot more fan fare than getting on a metro. They don't run that often and they sometimes fill up. It's much more like getting on a plane than a subway.
The time might get a little longer if you include time to get to the airport v. time to get to the station, but it's variable based on where particular people live.
That's probably +30-60 min though. An airport is outside a city; train stations usually are scattered within a city, with one in a very centre.
My ideal carry on baggage rules are:
- Anyone boarding with no carry on baggage has priority seat selection and boarding.
- All passengers are allowed one carry on baggage item.
- Additional carry on baggage has a $50 fee per item.
- All passengers are allowed 2 free checked bags.
- Additional checked bags have fuel offset fees.
Any airline that put this into place would immediately have all of my business the routes they operate, relevant to my travel needs.
(edit: formatting)
You definitely fly in comfort as a business passenger, but I wouldn't say you fly much more efficiently.
Not to pick on you specifically but, for a lot of people, bring less stuff. I don't use a roll-a-board for carry-on. I travel with fully legal soft-sided luggage that doesn't inflexibly take up as much space and a small computer bag. I rarely find I need to check luggage unless I'm doing activities that require sporting gear etc.
Airlines are partially to blame for this behavior as well, since they rarely enforce it or even give much guidance. People also walk very slowly into the plane, struggle to lift their stuff, then realize they need something out of the pocket so they hold up everyone while they get it. I also never understood why both doors aren't used for boarding and the planes boarded middle-first.
I bet I could get the boarding time down to about 40% of what it is right now with my suggested changes. In the security lines, there are too few lanes open and too few helpers. If I opt out of the idiot scanner, it adds at least 10 minutes, sometimes 30. I've had many TSA people be incredibly rude to me when I've opted out, one yelling at me for putting my carry on in front of another person's on the undriven, too-short conveyor belt after the same person had previously instructed me to remove my bag from the belt when I informed them I was opt-out (every other time I've flown, they make you wait like an idiot while your bag and the contents of your pockets sit on the other side of the conveyor, free for anyone else to take).
The security theatre on display is also infuriating. If one wanted to, travel with someone and have them not opt out, but grab your carry-on from the other side of the scanner while you wait for them to even call for someone to think about coming over to check the elastic in your underwear for a wine opener, which if they didn't confiscate, would have obviously been used to initialize the downfall of western civilization. Meanwhile, the random checks with guns in their pants get through the blow-hard machine all the time: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2015/06/01/poli...
My guess is that this is of no real benefit. Refueling, restocking, loading baggage, running maintenance checks, and other tasks need to happen before the airline can get the plane back into the air. Only extremely infrequently have I been on a plane that was able to roll back from the gate shortly after the last passenger boarded.
If the limiting factor here was passenger boarding times, airlines would have every incentive to improve the situation from where it is now. They have no incentive to speed up boarding to be any faster than the slowest of the rest of the preflight processes.
I always bring carry-on, not because I'm cheap, but because of exactly the reasons you mentioned regarding it being a pain in the ass to drop off and pick up checked in luggage.
The zone system and the way most airport terminals are designed make queueing and getting on the plane a horrendous cluster fsck.
Airports remind me of legacy software in many respects: they do things the way they do because they are building on foundation of garbage processes.
[1] Too many military memories
Qantas in Australia does this. If you fly often you can just order a permanent tag for your luggage. (you also get two anyway at higher FF levels)
> 5.) When I get off the plane, hand my luggage directly to me
How do you think this would work? Either the luggage or the people would have to be ordered. The way we're loading the planes and boarding, neither one is true. The carousel time is "free" for the airport, so that's the simplest solution.
People come off the plane pretty close to ordered (singled door model. A machine that reads the tags could sort the luggage cause it could know what seat you're in.
Airlines like people who carry on. It's no slower (for the airline), requires fewer ground staff, and leaves more room in the hold for paying cargo. Empty space on a plane is like fruit rotting on a supermarket shelf.
Each of those points could be much more efficient:
1.) Prescreen me for all things so that I exit the uber and walk upto the gate directly 2.) Let me print my own baggage tag at home and drop it at the gate when I arrive 3.) Dont let cheap idiots bring on carry on baggage and take up 200 ppl's time trying to jam it into an overhead bin 4.) Dont make me sit on the plane until absolutely ready, with a runway slot ready to go 5.) When I get off the plane, hand my luggage directly to me instead of making me wander around an airport looking for a terribly slow conveyor belt to eventually get my bag
I presume all of the above doesnt happen because, at the end of the day, there aren't sufficient travelers willing to pay the cost of implementation.