Originally Posted by
arlflyer
This is an example of the way that the airlines' one-sided contract terms and abuse have rotted the minds of otherwise intelligent people over years of exposure. They've brainwashed us. Now we're just happy to maybe get to where we're going or within a radius and within a couple days of when we booked.
"How would that work?" It would work how any other publicly-traded, for-profit corporation's operations work: they figure it out, they innovate, or they get eaten alive by competitors who are willing to do so. However, as long as there is still so much slack in the agreements that airlines make with passengers, there is no incentive to do so.
You answered the question yourself. FedEx doesn't make excuses about weather.
I'm not sure it's quite that simple. First, FedEx and UPS both do make excuses about weather, you just don't hear about it because there's no FT for packages. They are able to mitigate some issues, especially mechanical but sometimes weather related, but then so do the passenger carriers.
If you happen to be at a hub, for example, and your plane goes mechanical, there are times when they have the ability to swap equipment and minimize delays. Same for crew issues. If you happen to be where a crew is based, for example, the airline can bring a crew in and again minimize delays.
I'm not defending the airlines and I'm not saying they couldn't do a better job. What I am saying is that I don't think "one sided contracts" has much to do with it.
When you say that they need to innovate, no matter what they do, it really comes down to having crew and equipment in the right place at the right time. As there is no magic way to make that happen at a moments notice you have to schedule and anticipate as best you can what issues might occur.
The airlines could for example, look at which airports are affected the most by crew and/or equipment being out of place and then they could stage an extra plane and crew at those locations. Forgetting for a moment the cost of doing that, what happens when the second flight has an issue? Or if you have two planes and crews on standby, what happens when a third flight is affected?
The other thing to consider is that we generally only hear about the problems. We don't hear about the potential problems that were resolved because the airline was able to move equipment around and/or get a crew to work the flight.
Again, I'm not giving the airlines a free pass and saying they do everything right. I just think that it is a lot more complicated and I don't think you can really compare airlines to other business in terms of redundancy because of the logistics involved.