Travel Articles from John MacCalman

John MacCalman is a member of the CompuServe Travel Forum and has written several interesting articles on aviation matters. Here are some of these articles, as published in STAN - Scottish Travel Agents News.

The Secret of the Codes
The Hidden Cost of Dodgy Deals
Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?
A Hot Start
The Low Price is Right - Winter Off-Peak
Professor of Chicken or Beef?

The Secret of the Codes (as published in STAN - Scottish Travel Agents News)

It all started when the passenger was very upset that the check-in desk agent suggested that they were overweight on their flight to Fresno in California.

Their bags had been tagged to FAT and the passenger took it personally. It took a lot of reassuring by the supervisor that the FAT was the three-letter airport code for her destination - Fresno Air Terminal and not a comment on her condition.

The aviation world likes to confuse outsiders with codes and sometimes they also confuse the pros. The ICAO have allocated 4-letter codes for airports around the world but they tend to be pretty boring and have no real sense of history to the selection of letters.

IATA is the home of the three letter codes and these are normally made up of letters in the name of the city served* but not always. While ORL is the city code for Orlando in Florida it is not used as there are several airports serving the area. Most passengers go to MCO derived from McCoy Airforce Base the former occupant of the property.

Sometimes we are tempted to tell annoying customers to GTF - we can if they are going to Great Falls in Montana. New York's LGA airport is named after a former mayor of the city Fiorella LaGuardia, though there is a campaign to get it changed to Giuliani International Airport after New York's outgoing mayor Rudi G.

We all know who JFK is named after but only the old stagers amongst us will recall it used to be IDL for Idlewild. Nashville - home of country music is BNA named after Berry Field. But the code has become famous in its own right in Music City where there is now a major record label called BNA.

Chicago is no ORD-inary airport but that's not why the 3-letter code was chosen for O'Hare. It used to be known as Chicago Orchard Airport (Douglas) so they took the O and R from Orchard and the D of Douglas. 

Airports in Canada all begin with the letter Y as a result of a decision by that oxymoron "Canadian Government" many years ago for which we've been unable to trace exactly Y but we're certain that the good folk at AC will soon put us right.

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The Hidden Cost of Dodgy Deals (as published in STAN - Scottish Travel Agents News)

Hidden city and back-to-back ticketing are illegal according to airline fares tariffs and contracts of carriage yet the practise still goes on. 

For those who are not at the sharp end of airline ticketing, hidden city arises where a promotional fare to a point beyond a hub is far lower that the lowest fare to that hub. A passenger intending only to travel to the hub buys a ticket to the point beyond the hub (the hidden city) and throws away the coupons for the sectors to and from that city.

With sophisticated reservation and accounting systems this is frequently detected and as a result the passenger may lose their return reservation and be forced to pay the full fare. 

Back-to-back ticketing occurs when a passenger does not meet the minimum stay requirements for a deep discount round-trip fare. Instead of buying a full fare ticket he will purchase two deep-discount tickets, one from his originating city and the other from his destination city. Again he will throw away the unused coupons.

An agency issuing these tickets can also incur the wrath of the airline in the form of debit memos to compensate the carrier for the lost revenue. These don't help the BSP! (Travel agents IATA bank settlement plan)

Consumer advocates have argued that passengers should be allowed to use such methods in order to get the lowest fares possible. They claim that it should be illegal for airlines to ban such creative ticketing. 

While competition tends to bring about low promotional fares for some, the bread and butter revenue for full service airlines is business traffic paying full fare. This market tends to travel at peak times, at short notice and change flight bookings. Depending on the route, business travellers may only produce as low as 30% of the traffic and yet provide up to 80% of the revenue.

A report published by the United States General Accounting Office on Aviation Competition has come to the conclusion that if airlines were to permit people to use hidden city and back to back ticketing, many promotional fares would disappear or be vastly increased in price, routes and frequency of service would be cut and the full unrestricted fares would have to rise even further. The net result of this would be fewer people travelling on fewer flights at higher fares.

While the study was only on domestic US travel the model would work equally well in a deregulated Europe.

If you are a fares guru and are interested in checking out the full report you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader but you'll get it at the US Government website http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d01831.pdf It is over sixty pages long so have plenty of paper ready.

If you do go there, check out towards the back of the report the fascinating insight into inventory management showing the breakdown of fares actually paid on a sample flight. It's an eye-opener. It shows how you how a passenger travelling on the cheapest ticket could be sitting next to someone who has paid over eight times their fare for the same seat.

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Oh Dear, What Can The Matter Be (as published in STAN - Scottish Travel Agents News)

Many of today's young counter staff may be unfamiliar the old nursery rhyme which went on the lines of: Oh, dear, what can the matter be, three old ladies stuck in the lavatory, they were there from Monday to Saturday but nobody knew they were there. 

There is an apocryphal story that does the rounds from time to time claiming it happened to a rather large American lady last year who was flying on one of these very nice modern jets which was equipped with the latest high-tech vacuum toilet. She made the big mistake of remaining seated while flushing the toilet and became vacuum- sealed to the bowl. The flight crew were unable to release her and she had to remain "seated" till the aircraft had been parked at the stand, the doors opened and a engineer could board to disconnect the system. This story is not true but it is worth looking into the mechanics of in-flight toilets to see if you could become sealed to the seat.

Now this is not supposed to happen and our researches tell us that similar units are tested to 6 million cycles to ensure reliability, but perhaps not with large occupants sitting on top of them at the time. The flush button is normally located behind the users back when seated so they have to stand up to operate it.

However you may be interested to know a little bit about the history of aircraft toilets. In early planes it was a bucket. The aircraft were unpressurised and an open window or door was handy. Disposal was discretional when airborne. 

Many people think that still happens today and when you flush the toilet it goes straight out into the sky. This could not happen because of the damage it could cause to the outer skin of the aircraft if it came in to contact and airport aprons would be very messy places.

So as technology improved so did disposal. The waste goes into a holding tank on board and is cleared off by lavatory service trucks on the ground at the airport. They in turn take it to the airports sewage system for final disposal.

Toilets do get clogged up because people ignore the signs saying do not dispose of solid objects in the toilet. When this happens the toilet is out of order till the plane lands. Accidental clogging also happens and the most popular items are wallets, purses and mobile phones. These can sometimes be recovered but whether the owner would want to use them again even in the hands-free mode is doubtful.

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A Hot Start (as published in STAN - Scottish Travel Agents News)

The recent story concerning a charter flight from Milan to Cuba which "burst into flames" on takeoff according to the Reuters news agency has raised many an eyebrow in the travel industry. Apparently one of the engines failed shortly after takeoff and the passengers on board coming saw "flames" from the engine. The "fire" was soon extinguished and the engine re-started.

Despite assurance by the captain that everything was now OK the passengers were still extremely concerned so he gave them the opportunity to vote as to whether they continues on their way or returned to Milan. They figured that Malpensa was a good thought and returned to the airport.

Putting aside the fact that any time an aircraft develops a serious problem in flight, even though it is fixed in the air, that aircraft should head for the nearest suitable airport to be thoroughly checked out the issue of the co called "fire" has to be addressed.

Many years ago in the good old days when Northwest flew their DC10s from Boston to Scotland I was comfortably ensconced in a window seat towards the rear of the aircraft on a flight from Logan Airport after enjoying the hospitality of the Worldclubs lounge.

I looked out the window on the dark New England sky on a warm summer's night as we pushed back from the gate and I waited for the engines to start. Next thing I see is smoke then flames coming from the port engine. Very quickly I re-checked the location of the nearest emergency exits (right behind me) and awaited the command to evacuate the aircraft. Nothing happened. The crew were carrying on their duties in the cabin. Nobody else seemed to be aware what was going on. 

I looked out the window again. The flames had gone out, the smoke had almost disappeared into the night sky and the aircraft was starting to move under its own power. I was so glad I hadn't shouted, "fire!". That incident inspired a desire to find out exactly what had happened and is a reminder that all is not what it may seem.

A jet engine operates at extremely high temperatures so when it is stopped the inner core has to be cooled down before it can be restarted. The exhaust gas temperature (EGT) is monitored on the flight deck, the engine is turned over using electrical power to assist the cooling process, and once the temperature reaches a safe level, fuel is injected into the engine to allow it to restart. 

If the engine is not sufficiently cooled the fuel vaporises and can ignite as it leaves the engine produce the effect of the engine being on fire. What in fact is happening is the surplus gas is burning off in a contained controlled situation. This is known as a "hot start". It can be very alarming, but when properly monitored and controlled there is absolutely no danger. 

A real engine fire is indicated in the cockpit by a sophisticated system of alarms and extinguishers which should not be triggered by a hot start.

With an in-flight engine re-start the crew are not concerned with the niceties of hot start procedures. They want to get that engine back on fast, so as they carry out the restart you are very likely to see flames coming from the engine.

So when you read in the papers about a plane "bursting into flames" that maybe what the eyewitness thought was happening but the fire itself presented little danger to the aircraft. 

And as accident investigators will tell you, eyewitness reports are not the most reliable sources of information.

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The Low Price Is Right - Winter Off-Peak (as published in STAN - Scottish Travel Agents News)

We are in silly season for airfares as airlines desperate to fill seats resort to deep discounting. The problem with this is that passengers end up with the perception that the one way pre-tax fare from the UK to anywhere in the USA is under £100. So why can't they get a ticket at that price midsummer or at Christmas? And why can't they get an upgrade for that price? 

The stock reply when it comes to understanding airfares is market forces. The truth of the situation is far more intricate.

Fare pricing which ultimately determines how much money an airline makes from a route is a very complex and sophisticated system which leads to very strange situations. 

You may wonder why you can't get seats on flight in a discount class between Scotland and a major hub for point to point traffic, but if you are going beyond that hub with the same carrier the discount seats will open up in the CRS for the first sector - but only if you are booking right through to the destination beyond the hub. OK I know some of you try to cheat the system by capturing the discount seat that way.

What you are probably not aware of is the penalty system that operated within the yield management structure. Each airline has its own terminology for this but the principle is the same. In order to fill the seats with connecting passengers on a route between two points that has a period of low demand, the low demand sector has to pay (in internal accounting) a fee to the feeder route that is sacrificing a seat that they could sell at a higher fare. This payment makes up in part for the difference between the higher yield fare the airline could have sold in order to provide a passenger for the sector that had low demand and the share of fare actually sold. 

It is important to remember that an airline's aim is to make as much money as possible from any given market. Everything it does is towards that goal. It is after all a business. Where there is no competition, an airline can charge whatever it thinks it can extract out of the marketplace. 

But on the other hand the most perishable commodity is an empty airline Seat. You can't sell it once the flight has gone. So airline yield managers - the people responsible for ensuring the airline maximizes revenue - will look at ways of selling off surplus seats sometimes at heavy discounts without damaging the existing revenue they get from the full fare high prices. That's why you get fares that may appear to defy logic.

The end result is that airlines that do practise this kind of yield management make more money that those who don't. Remember the first law of airline fares for passengers:

Discount fares only apply to destinations you don't want on days of travel you can't go and conditions you can't meet.

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Professor of Chicken or Beef? (as published in STAN - Scottish Travel Agents News)

The news that Surrey University is to appoint the world's first professor of airline food and offer postgraduates a Masters degree in airline catering should not surprise those who work in that much maligned area of flight operations.

On a worldwide basis inflight catering business is worth around £10 billion a year and has an annual growth rate predicted over the next 5 years of about 5% according to the International Flight Catering Association (IFCA) who are funding the professorship with a half million pound grant. (around $700,000)

The industry employs directly over 100,000 people throughout the world, with at least that number again working in it indirectly. IFCA is a professional association serving the needs of all 600 member companies in the industry - scheduled and charter carriers, specialist catering companies, and supplier companies of equipment, food and beverages used in fulfilling passenger requirements.

Airline food has been the butt of jokes and the subject of low passenger expectation for a long time and not without some justification. The science of preparing food to be served at 35,000 feet is very demanding. 

Chefs on the ground can prepare the most delicious meals only to have them ruined by incorrect oven settings or simple failure to follow instructions.

The biggest problem is the cooking area. You can't have a big kitchen with naked flames on board an aircraft. Everything must be prepared to be handled by on board electric ovens then kept warm enough in containers while it is served up to 200+ hungry passengers. 

In this era of "no frills" airlines there is still a major demand for food on board whether it be a hot breakfast on a short shuttle to a five-course gourmet delight in first class on intercontinental flights.

Keeping food fresh appetising and tasty is a tough call but IFCA hope the Professor will produce Masters of Airborne Catering to tempt us on board with the fruits of their studies. 

Perhaps the soggy sandwich, overcooked entrée and limp lettuce will go the way of the tray of sweets they had to offer you when you flew in unpressurised aircraft. 

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09/10/2002