Tag: airlines

How to Make Air Travel Better with Orthogonal Thinking

MIKELeave a comment

Orthogonal thinking and alchemy means solving problems with nonintuitive variables.

A lot of great finance book use orthogonal thinking. Rather than ask: how to shop for Christmas on a budget, orthogonal thinking moves past money and asks something closer to: how to create meaningful Christmas moments.

That reframing changes the variable from dollars/gifts to moments/meaning. To get in that spirit, Blake Scholl told Tyler Cowen how to make air travel better (no indentation).

The other thing that we need to do, and this is part of why it’s not a solved problem, is we need to fix checked baggage. Because baggage check is unreliable and slow, we have people carrying onto airplanes things they absolutely do not want to carry.

If we fix airports such that baggage check is fast and reliable, then we can stop having carry-ons, and we can get on and off airplanes much, much faster than we can today. That would actually be the biggest win. Imagine an experience where you take your Uber to the airport. The bag that today you would carry on is in your trunk. You step out of the car, someone, maybe even a robot, grabs your bag from the trunk. You don’t see it again.

After you land, you get a push notification on your phone that says your Uber’s in slot seven A, and by the time you get to your Uber, your bag is back in the trunk. The customer experience is your bag teleports from the trunk of your Uber at your origin to the trunk of your Uber at your destination. That’s how they should work. Then you don’t carry on all this stuff and it’s much faster to get on and off airplanes.

This time is different: 70s airlines

MIKE4 Comments

This time is different is an attempt to understand when this time is different rather than when it’s not. Our working model is that TTID when the system changes.

In the high jump, things were different because the landing area went from wood chips to soft foam, allowing athletes to land on their back.

In startups like Uber, things were different because the technology costs like AWS and GPS fell. Similarly is Ben Thompson’s question: what happens when marginal costs are zero?

A systemic change was the case of airline deregulation in the 1970s:

“Something else happens and you can see it in the airline route maps. Look at one in 1978 and you don’t see that many red lines but in 2017 it’s an explosion of red all over the country and there will be these spots where they’re very dark: Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis. These are hub airports. Hub and spoke activity really takes off after this (airline deregulation) legislation.” – Bruce Carlson, My History can Bear up Your Politics, August 2021

Prior to deregulation, the average flight was 55% full and a ticket from New York to Los Angeles cost $1482 in inflation adjusted dollars compared to $268 in 2021. Carlson points out too that a number of companies like Pan Am went out of business after the deregulation.

Pan Am

Those idyllic phots are temping. Those were the days. But that’s like someone fifty years from now looking at Instagram and thinking that was life. Hey, everyone was beautiful and always on vacation.

These posts are an attempt to categorize when TTID. So far it’s when a fundamental aspect changes how a business creates value and captures value.

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In 2019 one billion people flew in the United States. One in six 2019 flyers were on a Southwest flight. One in twenty went through Atlanta.