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adrian_turtle(This is just for practice. I'm not doing failure analysis or playing the why game with a preschooler.)
1. Why is the passenger on the wrong plane?
Obviously, she's an idiot. Well, it's obvious to the flight attendants, when they're trying to be charitable about it and not assume she is maliciously trying to inconvenience them or sabotage their on-time record. "You should have used gate 24," they say, over and over, as people speak to a small child who is being very annoying in failing to understand.
2. Why did the passenger go through the wrong gate?
She may, of course, be an idiot. But there is always a residual desire to look for other explanations (whether to shift blame, or to protect systems against the ongoing supply of other idiots.)
2a) Gates 23 and 24 are in the same corner of the building, such that the lines overlap when they board at the same time. When approaching from one direction, the "24" sign is visible overhead, and the "23" is effectively invisible because one only sees it end-on. (The opposite problem faces those approaching from the perpendicular direction.)
2b) The agent looks at tickets fairly closely, feeds them through scanners and then inspects them for critical information...but does not check (or in this case, did not check) that the destination is correct.
2c) Severe time pressure and crowding always increase risk of error.
3. Why didn't the agent look at the destination when examining the ticket?
(Because she's an idiot? Probably not.)
3a) Because she's overworked and underpaid, in a position with no job security, and no power to control what is going on. She spends most of her days getting yelled at by anxious people with no control over what's happening to them, and listening to Fox and CNN Headline News on big screens. Anxious people are easily distracted.
3b) Because the goals of her job are to work as fast as possible getting people and baggage on planes, to detect ticket fraud, to perform security theater, and to assist in airport safety. She is probably in too much of a hurry to do anything else--she can look at the parts of the ticket she is trained to look at, and go to the next bit without seeing anything else.
4. Why was crowding so bad at the gate? Not many people usually fly these short hops around lunchtime, especially on weekdays. (Are they all just idiots?) There weren't all that many people in absolute terms. Both planes were fairly small, and they weren't completely full. The boarding area was just crowded chaos because so many people took their big (rollaboard) carryons onto the plane, then came back out when they realized they wouldn't fit. Then they crowded in the jetway to gate-check, getting in each others way in the course of taking bits and pieces out of the suitcases to put in their little bags. Why? They had all packed in the way that is sensible now that airlines charge extra for checking a bag--with one carryon that holds everything. The airplane had hardly any space for luggage, and no space at all for the big rollaboards (funny how fewer people tried to bring them onboard when they could check them for free.) And there are still a lot of items that people want to keep with them--medications, electronics with high resale value, etc. Chaos in the boarding area is not an accident.
5. What makes the time pressure so severe?
There are lots of different reasons for time pressure. The airport recommendation of arriving 90 minutes before boarding times of domestic flights is usually regarded as excessive. I aim to arrive 90 minutes before flight departure, which is 60 minutes before the official boarding time. (Usually 75-80 minutes before actual boarding time of short-hop shuttle flights.)
5a) MBTA cost-cutting may be inevitable in the current economy. Given a choice, decreasing frequency is probably a better idea than eliminating routes. However, it is deeply problematic when mbta.com recommends routes/timing based on the old schedules (or based on pure wishful thinking), rather than on the buses and trains they are actually running nowadays. So the MBTA added 45 minutes.
5b) There was no line at the American Airlines counter, which was pretty much expected for the time of day and week. The remarkable thing was that the kiosk, and then the ticket agent, tried so hard to sell me additional services. I refused, saving $65 dollars, but at the cost of almost 10 minutes. (I'm not sure it was worth it, in retrospect.) I suspect that gate agents have their job performance rated according to how fast they get passengers on and off planes, while ticket agents are rated partly according to how many extra services they manage to sell. Which runs counter to processing speed.
5c) Another surprising delay, considering the shortness of the line, happened at security. The TSA agents were doing the chatty, flirty, kind of security theater...Wednesday afternoon at the improv. I appreciate the attempt to appear less menacing, but it's inconvenient when a person is in a hurry. (And the power dynamic is such that it really is not feasible to ask them to hurry it up.)
1. Why is the passenger on the wrong plane?
Obviously, she's an idiot. Well, it's obvious to the flight attendants, when they're trying to be charitable about it and not assume she is maliciously trying to inconvenience them or sabotage their on-time record. "You should have used gate 24," they say, over and over, as people speak to a small child who is being very annoying in failing to understand.
2. Why did the passenger go through the wrong gate?
She may, of course, be an idiot. But there is always a residual desire to look for other explanations (whether to shift blame, or to protect systems against the ongoing supply of other idiots.)
2a) Gates 23 and 24 are in the same corner of the building, such that the lines overlap when they board at the same time. When approaching from one direction, the "24" sign is visible overhead, and the "23" is effectively invisible because one only sees it end-on. (The opposite problem faces those approaching from the perpendicular direction.)
2b) The agent looks at tickets fairly closely, feeds them through scanners and then inspects them for critical information...but does not check (or in this case, did not check) that the destination is correct.
2c) Severe time pressure and crowding always increase risk of error.
3. Why didn't the agent look at the destination when examining the ticket?
(Because she's an idiot? Probably not.)
3a) Because she's overworked and underpaid, in a position with no job security, and no power to control what is going on. She spends most of her days getting yelled at by anxious people with no control over what's happening to them, and listening to Fox and CNN Headline News on big screens. Anxious people are easily distracted.
3b) Because the goals of her job are to work as fast as possible getting people and baggage on planes, to detect ticket fraud, to perform security theater, and to assist in airport safety. She is probably in too much of a hurry to do anything else--she can look at the parts of the ticket she is trained to look at, and go to the next bit without seeing anything else.
4. Why was crowding so bad at the gate? Not many people usually fly these short hops around lunchtime, especially on weekdays. (Are they all just idiots?) There weren't all that many people in absolute terms. Both planes were fairly small, and they weren't completely full. The boarding area was just crowded chaos because so many people took their big (rollaboard) carryons onto the plane, then came back out when they realized they wouldn't fit. Then they crowded in the jetway to gate-check, getting in each others way in the course of taking bits and pieces out of the suitcases to put in their little bags. Why? They had all packed in the way that is sensible now that airlines charge extra for checking a bag--with one carryon that holds everything. The airplane had hardly any space for luggage, and no space at all for the big rollaboards (funny how fewer people tried to bring them onboard when they could check them for free.) And there are still a lot of items that people want to keep with them--medications, electronics with high resale value, etc. Chaos in the boarding area is not an accident.
5. What makes the time pressure so severe?
There are lots of different reasons for time pressure. The airport recommendation of arriving 90 minutes before boarding times of domestic flights is usually regarded as excessive. I aim to arrive 90 minutes before flight departure, which is 60 minutes before the official boarding time. (Usually 75-80 minutes before actual boarding time of short-hop shuttle flights.)
5a) MBTA cost-cutting may be inevitable in the current economy. Given a choice, decreasing frequency is probably a better idea than eliminating routes. However, it is deeply problematic when mbta.com recommends routes/timing based on the old schedules (or based on pure wishful thinking), rather than on the buses and trains they are actually running nowadays. So the MBTA added 45 minutes.
5b) There was no line at the American Airlines counter, which was pretty much expected for the time of day and week. The remarkable thing was that the kiosk, and then the ticket agent, tried so hard to sell me additional services. I refused, saving $65 dollars, but at the cost of almost 10 minutes. (I'm not sure it was worth it, in retrospect.) I suspect that gate agents have their job performance rated according to how fast they get passengers on and off planes, while ticket agents are rated partly according to how many extra services they manage to sell. Which runs counter to processing speed.
5c) Another surprising delay, considering the shortness of the line, happened at security. The TSA agents were doing the chatty, flirty, kind of security theater...Wednesday afternoon at the improv. I appreciate the attempt to appear less menacing, but it's inconvenient when a person is in a hurry. (And the power dynamic is such that it really is not feasible to ask them to hurry it up.)
