Mar 1 JDN 2458910

I’m traveling this week, so I have less time for blogging than usual and airlines are very much on my mind. So I thought I’d write a short post about things I would change if I were to run my own airline.

1. Instead of overpriced first-class seats, offer the option of seats with more space for a proportional amount. First class prices are almost never worth it, and people seem to be figuring that out: Use of first class is in decline. But sitting in that middle seat is so miserable, why not simply eliminate it? I think a lot of people would be willing to pay 50% more for 50% more space.

2. Offer every passenger two free checked bags, but charge for the carry-on. Carry-on bags are far more awkward and disruptive, and slow down boarding and deboarding much more, than checked bags. The airline should be trying to incentivize passengers to use checked baggage as much as possible. I’d still give each passenger a free personal item (like a purse, backpack or laptop bag), and some people would still want a carry-on bag (e.g. for cameras that can be damaged by radiation); but most people really don’t need to have a roller bag as a carry-on.

3. Power outlets in every seat. This is a trivial amount of cost in terms of manufacturing and electricity, compared to what an airplane already requires; but it makes flying much more convenient for your passengers, and thereby allows you to demand higher prices. This is a no-brainer. (Some airlines, like Delta, already do this.)

4. Assign seats and load the plane based on the seating positions. The first boarding group should be the people who sit furthest in the back, so that no one needs to pass seated passengers in order to find their own seat. Ideally window seats would be filled before aisle seats, but since people like to board and sit together, that might not be feasible. But at the very least we can make boarding faster by seating the back rows first.

5. Give pilots and flight attendants reasonable hours and plenty of vacation time. Airline pilots around the world are dangerously overworked and sleep-deprived. This is dangerous for customers, and if it leads to crashes or lawsuits it can be very expensive for the airlines too. Having an aircraft idle overnight really isn’t that great a cost, especially since red-eye flights command lower prices and are thus less profitable for the airline. Working fewer hours makes people more productive per hour—often to the point of making them more productive overall.

6. Explain why you need to put on your own oxygen mask first. Standard airplane safety instructions always include the line “Put on your mask before assisting others.” But since they almost never explain why, I strongly suspect that in a real emergency a lot of parents try to put on their children’s masks first and thereby needlessly endanger themselves. Wording these instructions might be tricky, because any talk of such things is bound to scare people, but the core idea is this: Hypoxia will cause delirium or unconsciousness long before it will cause permanent brain damage or death. You want to first make sure you aren’t incapacitated, and then you can help save others. If you put on your mask first, your kid may get confused or pass out, but you’ll be able to help them and they’ll be fine. If you put on your kid’s mask first, you may get confused or pass out, and your kid won’t be able to help you. Then unless someone else saves you, you may die pointlessly because you didn’t follow instructions. Depending on altitude and how severe the hull breach is, you have about 30 seconds before you lose consciousness. But your kid has at least three minutes before you need to worry about permanent brain damage, and probably as many as fifteen before they’d die.

7. Include carbon offsets in the ticket price, and advertise this aggressively. Despite the fact that airplanes are a major source of carbon emissions, carbon offsets are actually remarkably cheap compared to the cost of airline tickets. Adding offsets would typically raise the price of a ticket by about $30, which on a $300 ticket is unlikely to shock people. And by advertising the carbon-neutrality of your airline, you can probably get a lot of customers who are willing to pay more, potentially even more than the additional cost of the carbon offsets themselves. This could be a win-win for the airline and the environment.

8. Invest heavily in research on more efficient jet engines. The second-biggest cost for an airline is fuel expenditure. (First is the wages of the crew.) If you can install more efficient engines on your aircraft, you can both reduce your environmental impact and dramatically lower your cost. Current state-of-the-art engines can reduce fuel consumption by as much as 20%; future research could improve this even further.

9. Include snacks at every seat before passengers even board. Putting a bag of pretzels and a water bottle at every seat would be trivially easy, and would allow passengers the opportunity to be eating while the plane takes off—and chewing reduces the discomfort of changing air pressure. If the worry is that people will try to put their tray tables down (which is genuinely unsafe during takeoff), install electronic locks that prevent tray tables from being lowered except when authorized.

10. Install seats that don’t recline. The additional comfort for the passenger reclining is far smaller than the reduced comfort for the passenger behind them. Combine that with the additional cost of maintaining the seats and the additional risk of injury during rough landings, and the answer is obvious: Seats shouldn’t recline.

11. Offer better food. Charging less for airplane food honestly isn’t feasible: Because space and weight are at such a premium, it really is that expensive to store and transport food on an aircraft. But the cost comes mostly from the bulk and weight of the food; it really doesn’t much matter what kind of food it is. To that end, airlines should offer high-quality food that people feel more comfortable paying such high prices for. A steak weighs about the same as a hamburger, and champagne has about the same density as Sprite.

12. Reduce, or even eliminate, fees to change flights. Yes, it’s expensive to have empty seats on a moving airplane. But most flights can be filled by standby passengers, and those that can’t often weren’t full anyway. It’s actually fairly rare for a cancellation to result in an empty seat that would otherwise have been full. And the additional goodwill you get from making life easier for your passengers will make up the difference. (Southwest figured this out; other airlines don’t yet seem to have caught on.)

Would these changes revolutionize air travel? No. But I do think they’d make it a bit more pleasant, without greatly reducing the profits of the airline.