Customs queues

The Numbers Guy column in today’s Wall Street Journal relates to our recent post on delays clearing customs at Heathrow (Border Delay Data Leave Fliers Up in the Air, May 5). He hits on a number of points similar to what we brought up. First, demands are going to be very peaked over the day. [...]

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Queues become political at Heathrow

Here at the Operations Room, we like queues — not so much standing in them but talking about them. Indeed, about the only thing better than us talking about queues would be if queues became a political issue and people with impressive job titles were forced to talk about them. And that is exactly what [...]

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New York Airports and Delays

I am sitting at Newark airport and blogging about delays is New York’s airports in the hope of reverse-jinxing my flight.  The WSJ had an interesting article on the fact that New York’s airports account for half of all flight delays (“N.Y. Airports Account for Half of All Flight Delays”.) The title of the article [...]

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Super Bowl Congestion

I promised Gady that I would post something about the Super Bowl. (I had assumed that Jan wouldn’t know about the game.) I had though of revisiting how pizza parlors prepare for the game since there has been much in the news about the volume of junk Americans will consume while watching the Giants and [...]

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Using RFID to eliminate airport queues

How should airlines get passengers through airports with minimal delay? One possibility is to provide loads of capacity. There are two ways to do that. One is hire lots of staff or put out lots of kiosks. That requires both money and space. The Wall Street Journal reports (The Trump Card at Check-In, Dec 29) [...]

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Fining airports for long security waits

Security lines are the  bane of the air traveler’s life. So what if there were clear standards that had to be hit? That gets us this news release from Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA Requires Changes To Security Queue Measurement At Heathrow And Gatwick, Oct 12): As part of its regulation, the CAA imposes strict targets [...]

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Queuing to clear customs

What is an appropriate waiting time for clearing immigration at an international airport? It’s an interesting question. There is clearly a trade off (given fixed staffing levels) between the thoroughness of interviewing arriving passengers and the speed at which they move through the system. However, it is not clear just what the objective is. From [...]

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Southwest Airlines: Do free bags create problems?

Southwest along with Walmart and Toyota have long been stock examples in Operations Management classes. They have always been reliable go to examples of firms whose success has depended in non-trivial ways on how they manage their operations. Of course, the problem with relying on a stock example is that little things like, I dunno, [...]

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Airlines are doing better with bags

Here are some interesting numbers from the Wall Street Journal (Better Odds of Getting Your Bags, Dec 2). So airlines are doing a much better job of getting checked bags where they are suppose to go. Of course, there a certain he’s-fast-for-a-catcher ring to that. The problem of lost luggage, of course, is far from [...]

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Opt-out day and queues

So Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving and one of the busiest travel days of the year, has been designated as National Opt-Out Day by those a little fed up with the Transportation Security Administration insistence on full-body scanners and aggressive pat downs. As its organizers sell it, this is an attempt to raise the issue in [...]

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