 |
A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
| About Mark Hurst | Mark's Gel Conference | New York Times Story on This Is Broken | Newsletter: Subscribe | RSS Feed |
Search this site:
Categories:
- Advertising
- Current Affairs
- Customer Service
- Fixed
- Food and Drink
- Just for Fun
- Misc
- Not broken
- Place
- Product Design
- Signs
- Travel
- Web/Tech
Previous: Map to conference center | Main | Next: Stock photo choice
July 6, 2005 12:06 AM
Broken: Wilmington, NC airport monitors
David Gallagher writes:
Here's a pretty monitor that displays departure information at the Wilmington, N.C. airport. It reflects not the actual status of flights, as travelers would expect, but the SCHEDULE of flights.
I took this photo while waiting to board the 7:20 flight to LaGuardia. The moment the clock hit 7:20, the flight status switched to 'departed,' even though half the passengers were not yet on the plane.
A plague of locusts could ground every plane in the nation and this thing would still be merrily ticking off departures. (It's a safe bet that the 'arrivals' screens have the same problem.) This is an information system that actually has less information about what's going on than the people who are supposed to benefit from it.
To its credit, the airport does offer free Wi-Fi.
Second!
this is funny.
it is a retarded monmitor that is very young and thinks everything goes perfectly right and nothing goes wrong.It is so young it doesnt even know how to use caps
This reminds me of a story. We used to have a friend who was ALWAYS late for social events. We'd go to pick her up at an appointed time and she'd still need an hour to get ready. So we started telling her everything started an hour earlier than it actually did, and all went smoothly.
If I were designing airport scheduling displays I'd program them to lie a little bit about the status and timing of departures and arrivals. I'd indicate the plane was BOARDING five minutes before the gate opened, so people would get off their laptops and get in line, and change it to DEPARTED five minutes before it actually pulled away, to make latecomers rush to the gate and help prevent delaying planes.
Better yet, I would *study* the effects of various flavors of intentional inaccuracy to see which produces the best on-time performance for planes. Maybe a *random* system would work best! Who knows?
I don't know if this is broken, but I'm pretty sure the it's even more broken that individual people cause flight delays.
Peanuts, anyone?
Another bit of airline schedule trickery is delays built into the time table. New York to Washington may be a 30 minute flight, but it's listed as departing 5pm and arriving 6:30pm. That's because they know they're going to wait for 60 minutes on the taxi-way to get a take off slot during the afternoon rush. But it still lands "on time."
Robby: If the plane I was supposed to be on was listed as "DEPARTED," why on earth would I rush to the gate for that plane?
I noticed this same problem at the airport in Madison, WI a few weeks ago. I was picking up my mom and grandma and needed to see if their plane had arrived yet. However, the monitors there didn't even bother to say "arrived" or "departed." Just "on time." Better yet, their plane was almost 45 min. late, and was still listed as "on time." Thankfully, it's a rather small airport, so it was evident that their flight hadn't come in yet.
mph: Don't ask me, I'm generally on time for flights. Ask David Gallager, who was not only not on the the plane when it was supposed to depart, but figured he had enough time to snap a photo :-)
It might be a little better to use the words NOW DEPARTING instead of the past tense DEPARTED, but in either case I bet you'd hurry. Why? Because in these terror-strickened days, any time you've checked in for a flight (with stowed luggage) you know they are going to hold the plane for you to reduce the threat risk.
Maybe they will get really snippy in the future, and departure screens in airports will read: "207 TO NEW YORK CITY - WAITING ON PASSENGER JOE SMITH TO DEPART"
This reminds me of the time my dad set all of the clocks an hour back before our flight, so my mom wouldn't make us late...
"This reminds me of the time my dad set all of the clocks an hour back before our flight, so my mom wouldn't make us late..."
So you were TWO hours late?
"This reminds me of the time my dad set all of the clocks an hour back before our flight, so my mom wouldn't make us late..."
So you were TWO hours late?
"This reminds me of the time my dad set all of the clocks an hour back before our flight, so my mom wouldn't make us late..."
So you were TWO hours late?
A few years back I went with kids (then 2 and 4 years old) across Denver to meet my wife coming in from SLC on a 7pm flight.
Of course I called Delta first (I'm no fool!) and was told the flight was on time. Got there just in time. Looked up the flight on the arrival board, went to the gate shown, saw the plane pull in, waited as passengers got off, and longer... no wife. Asked at the gate, was told "Oh, this is a different flight. The one you want HASN'T TAKEN OFF YET. We used this gate because it was going to be a while." Practically snarled at her about the phone information and the monitor, got two pieces of advice:
1. They always say on the phone that flights are on time because they want you to be on time even if they're not.
2. In Denver at least, the departure/arrival boards are maintained by the City of Denver, who runs the Airport. The airlines "can't do anything about" the information on the monitors. Especially during non-business hours. They feed in the information for the boards hours, if not days, ahead.
Pretty slick huh? The airlines don't care if they waste your time as long as you don't waste theirs, and you have a snowball's chance of getting anyone in city government to hear your complaint about the monitors.
So I got to do what anyone would have to do - drive 45 minutes back across town with sleepy/cranky kids, put them to bed for 1 hour, get them back up to drive 45 minutes back to meet Mom.
There is a special place in hell reserved for whoever invented this system. And for their lying on the phone, Delta deserves the bankruptcy they will shortly undergo.
"In Denver at least, the departure/arrival boards are maintained by the City of Denver, who runs the Airport. The airlines "can't do anything about" the information on the monitors. Especially during non-business hours. They feed in the information for the boards hours, if not days, ahead."
You are correct. Most Flight Information Screens are maintained by the airport, and not by individual airlines.
At the airport I am in frequently, the airline owns the Flight Information Screens in each of the concourses it occupies (main hub for the airline). Those screens are updated to the minute every minute. Likewise, the screens in the airport common areas are ran by the airport, and are updated less frequently.
The picture is most certainly of an airport's screen, and not an airline's. There is two columns, one for "Schedule", another for "Actual". It appears that the information was not transferred from the airline to indicate that the flight was not going to be departing "on time".
"Another bit of airline schedule trickery is delays built into the time table. New York to Washington may be a 30 minute flight, but it's listed as departing 5pm and arriving 6:30pm. That's because they know they're going to wait for 60 minutes on the taxi-way to get a take off slot during the afternoon rush. But it still lands "on time.""
The government requires airlines to report the percentage of flights that arrived "On Time". Because of this, many airlines will plan appropriately accounting for last minute "gate" delays (baggage, last minute special needs passenger, etc.) and for ground and air delays, including taxiing to/from the runway, holding patterns and such.
With this mentality, only a weather or aircraft problem will cause a flight to not arrive "on time"
Tampa Int'l doesn't do that. They say On Time, Delayed, Canceled, Arriving, etc. They're pretty good. They also display the actual time of departure and ETA, instead of one determined months before.
Geez, Kip! I hope your pilots aren't complaining over the intercom! Anyway, Kip, your whole post is pretty much an undecipherable mess. Go away.
I don't think this is broken. Rather, I think it's an operator error. The board assumes things will function as scheduled unless it's told otherwise and somebody didn't bother to tell it otherwise.
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Map to conference center | Main | Next: Stock photo choice
Yup, broken. No dispute. But at least it saves time and money for the airline.
"Billy, the monitor says your dad's plane has arrived. Let's go."
"But Mom, the plane's not even there!"
"Foolish, foolish Billy. Never doubt airline monitors..."
First.
Posted by: Jello B. at July 6, 2005 04:04 AM