How the air cargo market has adjusted to the pandemic

The ongoing pandemic has created a host of problems for a host of industries and supply chains. Logistics providers have had to scramble as demand for some goods has dried up while demand for other items has surged. On top of that, passenger airlines — which play a large role in international air freight — have been hard hit. How is all that playing out? Check out this video:

 

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Why are planes flying?

The Wall Street Journal runs a weekly column called The Middle Seat on travel and the travel industry. This week’s column (Why Empty Planes Keep Flying Through the Pandemic, May 6) tries to answer a really interesting question: Why are airlines flying planes even if they are mostly empty?

First, some eye-popping numbers from the article. US Airlines have idled about 75% of their capacity. That sounds like a lot but not when you realize that passenger traffic is down 90%. Supposedly 99% of American flights are less than 20% full.

So why fly? One answer is a sense of obligation. There may be only a handful of passengers on the flight but they are all either healthcare workers or dealing with family emergencies. That is, these are people who need to be traveling who will be had to placate or accommodate if a flight is cancelled.

Another answer is a legal obligation. The aid the government has supplied so far is contingent airlines still serving all of their destinations. An airline does not have to still run three flights a day to Podunk Regional Airport but they still have to go to Podunk.

The more interesting reasons, of course, are operational.

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Putting passengers and their carry-on luggage on planes

How to get people on to planes is something we have covered many times on this blog. However, it is always interesting when some airline tries something new. That gets us to Delta’s Early Valet (Airlines try to save time with speedier boarding process, Associated Press, Jun 1).

Delta’s Early Valet service will offer to have airline employees take carry-on bags at the gate and put them in the bins above assigned seats. The airline wants to see if its own workers can load the bins faster than passengers.

The service began Monday on about two dozen flights, and that number is expected to rise steadily during June, Delta spokeswoman Morgan Durrant said.

Early Valet will be offered through August on some departures from Delta’s busiest airports — Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City and Seattle.

It will be available only on flights that typically have a high number of vacationers. Presumably, business travelers know how to board a plane efficiently. Specially tagged bags will be stowed on the plane before boarding begins, Durrant said.

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The best day to buy an airline ticket revisited

What would you expect to be the most popular post on this blog? Something on lean operations? One of those posts on managing queues? Nope. The most popular post by a wide margin (more than 13,000 page views than the next most popular post) is something Gad wrote in 2011 on how airline ticket prices vary by day of week. The conclusion of that analysis was that Tuesdays are the best day to buy. The story behind this rests on how airlines manage their pricing. While airline revenue management systems are largely automated closing out fare classes on flights as fill up, they do require some human intervention. That intervention tends to happen early in the week as managers evaluate how well leisure fares sold over the weekend.

But is that still true? According to the Wall Street Journal, no (The Best Day to Buy Airline Tickets, Oct 22).

A new deep dive into airline fares suggests Sunday is the best day to find low fares. This is a departure from the conventional wisdom of recent years, when Tuesday was considered the best bet.

Airlines Reporting Corp., which processes tickets for travel agencies and handles about half of all tickets sold, tallied up ticket sales. Over a 19-month period ending in July, 130 million domestic and international round-trip tickets worth $94 billion showed the lowest average price, of $432, was on Sunday. At $439, Saturday’s average is also lower than Tuesday, which averages $497.

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New peaks in airline scheduling

Airlines compete, in part, by offering lots of origin-destination pairs. Not matter in which backwater burg you reside, they strive to get you to every equally lonely outpost. That might overstate the case, but most airlines try to offer options that connect most reasonably sized cities. Most airlines consequently favor hub-and-spoke configurations for their networks that funnel passengers from all over into a limited set of points (like Chicago and Houston) before heading back out to a range of cities.

But how should an airline arrange its flight into a hub? One option is to bunch arrivals closely together so that departures can similarly be bunched together. Call that peaked scheduling. Alternatively, the airline can have a smoother flow of planes coming in. Arrivals to a hub are spread across the morning as opposed to, say, having a large number of planes land between 9:00 and 10:00.

Peaked scheduling was used by most airlines for many years but has been on the outs for the last decade or so. Now, however, it is making a comeback (Airlines Create Rush Hours, Crowds and Full Flights, Sep 10, Wall Street Journal).

Instead of spacing flights evenly throughout the day, American in August started bunching them together. The change restores an old format of “peak” scheduling, grouping flights into busy flying times followed by lulls when gates are nearly empty. After Miami International, American next year will “re-peak” schedules at its largest hubs in Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth. …

In Miami on a typical weekday, 42 flights depart between 9 and 10 a.m. Then between 10 and 11 a.m., only a handful are scheduled to take off. The process repeats during the day with 10 “banks” of flights that fill about 45 gates at a time.

The interesting part of this is that a peaked versus non-peaked schedule is really a trade off between customer service and operating cost.

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Can changing how passenger act at the gate improve airplane boarding?

How to get people onto planes is an interesting topic. It is a process most of us go through with some regularity and it is hard not to think that there has to be a better way. There are many articles in the popular press explaining that in many ways airlines are doing it wrong (for an example, see this recent Quartz article). Academics like publishing papers on new methodologies that purport to work better — even if their approach is at best whimsical (would an airline assign seats based on who has carry on luggage?). But what if the secret to a smooth boarding process was really in the gate area not in the jet bridge or plane aisle?

That essentially is the premise of some work reported in the Wall Street Journal (In Tests, Scientists Try to Change Behaviors, Jul 28).

At the Copenhagen airport, Dr. Hansen recently deployed a team of three young researchers to mill about a gate in terminal B. The trio was dressed casually in jeans and wore backpacks. They blended in with the passengers, except for the badges they wore displaying airport credentials, and the clipboards and pens they carried to record how the boarding process unfolds. …

The researchers are mapping out gate-seating patterns for a total of about 500 flights. Some early observations: The more people who are standing, the more chaotic boarding tends to be. Copenhagen airport seating areas are designed for groups, even though most travelers come solo or in pairs. Solo flyers like to sit in a corner and put their bag on an adjacent seat. Pairs of travelers tend to perch anywhere as long as they can sit side-by-side.

For the next stage of the project, the airport has given the researchers permission to change seating configurations at some terminal gates to figure out which arrangements are most likely to encourage greater numbers of passengers to sit down and help make the boarding process more orderly. Among possible ideas the team is considering are expanding the number of spots that could encourage single travelers to sit and placing signs with updates about the status of the boarding in key locations.

When people are uncertain about the process, they tend to follow each other, and that can lead to a large group of people clogging up the boarding, Dr. Hansen says.

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Tell the TSA what to do with their lines!

Have you ever wished you could tell the TSA what to do with itself? Now, you have that opportunity — at least when it comes to how they organize and manage their queues. To make things even better, they might actually pay you! The Transportation Security Administration has posted a challenge asking for people to develop a simulation model to tackle the capacity management issues of getting people through airport security. If you are interested in the challenge, the official call is here. Here are some of the specific considerations that need to be tackled:

TSA is looking for the Next Generation Checkpoint Queue Design Model to apply a scientific and simulation modeling approach to meet the dynamic security screening environment. The new queue design should include, but not limited to the following queue lanes:

• TSA Pre✓™
• Standard
• Premier Passengers (1st class, business class, frequent fliers, etc.)
• Employee and Flight Crews
• PWD (wheelchair access)

The Challenge is to provide a simulation modeling concept that can form the basis to plan, develop requirements, and design a queue appropriately. The concept will be used to develop a model to be applied in decision analysis and to take in considerations of site specific requirements, peak and non-peak hours, flight schedules and TSA staffing schedules. Solvers are expected to provide the concept and provide evidence that it works as described in the requirements.

According to Nextgov.com, there are specific performance targets for different classes of customers (Attention, Passengers: $15,000 Prize for Whoever Can Speed TSA Screening, Jul 18)

The line, in this scenario, extends from the point where a passenger joins the end of the queue to the metal detector or body scan machine.

The rules for the challenge state wait times cannot be more than 5 minutes for PreCheck and 10 minutes for standard lines.

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If I bring a laptop on my next flight, what does it cost the airline?

It’s been a while since we have posted about airline baggage fees, one of my favorite topics. As I have argued before (see here or here), baggage fees are interesting since they serve as a way to regulate passenger behavior and potentially lower airline costs. Fewer bags means less labor in loading them on and off planes or tracking down lost bags. It also potentially means less weight if passengers actually bring less stuff aboard. But how much is any of that worth? Are we talking about pennies or dollars or thousands of dollars?

The folks at FiveThirtyEight have tried to answer part of that question (Why Budget Airlines Could Soon Charge You to Use the Bathroom, Jun 30). More specifically, they look at the negative impact of adding extra weight to the average flight (or the gain to be had from shedding weight). Here is how they described their methodology.

Our analysis takes into account the distance of a flight, the weight carried onboard the aircraft, and the aircraft type itself. It then simulates every phase of the flight, from departure gate to arrival gate, in order to determine the fuel consumed at each moment along the flight path. To get an idea of how adding small amounts of weight can affect fuel burn on a typical flight, we analyzed a flight from Boston to Denver operated by a Boeing 737-700. Southwest Airlines operates this service three times per day.

According to our model, the total cost of fuel for operating this flight with 122 passengers (85 percent of the maximum seating-capacity) is about $7,900. Each marginal pound onboard the aircraft for this flight will result in a marginal fuel cost of a little less than 5 cents. So if every passenger remembered to go to the bathroom before boarding, shedding an average of 0.2 liters of urine, the airline would save $2.66 in fuel on this flight alone. Such tactics are not off limits. Ryanair famously contemplated charging customers to use the bathroom (in an effort to reduce the number of on-board bathrooms and pack on more seats). Company spokesman Stephen McNamara said in 2010, “By charging for the toilets we are hoping to change passenger behavior so that they use the bathroom before or after the flight.”

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How flight delays vary over the day

Systems with randomness are inherently subject to delay. But how does that delay vary over the day? That is, if we think of a service setting with “peak” hours that in some sense resets every day, when are delays worst? Note that this would be relevant for, say, a restaurant that closes every evening or for a hospital emergency room that doesn’t officially close but typically does see a dramatic drop in volume in the overnight hours. Intuitively, one would expect that delays build over the day. Now Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has provided a graphical illustration of how delay builds for a stochastic system — specifically for US domestic flights (Fly Early, Arrive On-Time, Apr 19).

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Managing TSA screen capacity for Precheck passengers

Pity the Transportation Security Administration! They have a tricky capacity planning problem with their Pre✓™ program. Here is how the TSA describes Pre✓™:

TSA Pre✓™ allows low-risk travelers to experience expedited, more efficient security screening at participating U.S. airport checkpoints for domestic and international travel.

The perks of the program of the program include being able to leave your shoes on, not having to take out your laptop, and leaving your baggie of toothpaste buried in your carry-on. All of that gets you faster screening and — in theory — a faster moving line. The program started off being by invitation but has broadened to include those enrolled in the Custom and Boarder Patrol Global Entry program. Now anyone can apply. The trade off for travelers is that you have to pony up for a background check. For the TSA, it allows them to expend fewer resources on people it knows something about so more time can be spent on those it has no information on.

So what’s the problem? The issue is how the system has to be implemented at airports. Pre✓™ flyers go in a separate line and then through separate equipment and personnel. But, as the Wall Street Journal tells it, that is costly for the TSA and they cannot readily justify dedicating the current resource levels unless they can get more flyers signed up (Trouble Selling Fliers on the Fast Airport Security Line, Apr 16).

TSA wants lots more people enrolled in Precheck to make better use of its designated security lanes, which currently number 590 at 118 U.S. airports. Since December, TSA has encouraged travelers to apply to the program directly. The agency is opening enrollment centers across the country, letting people who are U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents to make an appointment or drop in and have fingerprints taken digitally. The $85 background-check fee buys five years of enrollment.

“It’s one of the last great bargains the U.S. government is offering,” TSA Administrator John Pistole joked at an enrollment-center opening last week at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

TSA said more than 1.2 million people as of December were able to use Precheck, mostly because they had enrolled in Global Entry. Since TSA began taking applications directly, some 170,000 additional people have signed up for Precheck. The program appears on track, but if more travelers don’t sign up TSA will have to scale back the number of Precheck lanes at airports, Mr. Pistole said. TSA hasn’t set an optimum number of enrollees for the program, he said.

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