MIT Proposal Misses The Point: Sharing Flight Delays Does Not Mean Less Pain
If only U.S. airlines would learn to play nice and share each other’s burdens the world would be a happier place. So carriers should take turns absorbing the brunt of flight delays from one day to the next.
That stunningly vapid observation masquerading as serious analytical analysis and advice is the product of a couple of (presumably serious) researchers at the vaunted Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their analysis – and their solution – would be laughable if it weren’t so flawed. Arguably, the only thing more amazing about the study is that Transportation Science, an obscure but respected academic publication, published the report in April and USA TODAY (full disclosure, my former employer) actually took it seriously enough to write about it on Thursday.
Pardon the following plunge into the kind of pretentious writing style favored by academicians, but there’s no better way to show what I mean. In their research report, “Fairness and Collaboration in Network Air Traffic Flow Management: An Optimization Approach,” Dimitris Bertsimas and Shubham Gupta “propose a discrete optimization model that attempts to incorporate an equitable distribution of delays among airlines by introducing a notion of fairness” into how flight delays impact each carrier.
Put more simply, the authors are suggesting that if American suffered a bunch of delays yesterday, today Delta should voluntarily take the brunt of the today’s delays. Then tomorrow it will be United’s turn, and so on. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but not a lot.
Fairness? In the way airlines deal with delays? Really? Are these guys on crack?
Why would any airline executive ever agree to share equally in all of his or her competitors’ operational pain? Careers are never made by making sure your company always performs more or less the same as all its competitors. Young airline executives seeking to climb the career ladder can only make it to each successive rung by being able to show their bosses how they contributed to their airline kicking the snot out of the competition in some narrowly-defined way. And pretty much every senior airline manager at or near the top rungs of those ladders was once a young ladder climber, too, so they think very much the same way. I can guarantee you that they’re not going to go for any “share the pain” approaches. In fact, they can be counted on always to seek advantage for themselves and their airlines.
Beyond the very fallacious central notion behind MIT’s entire “Airline Fairness and Collaboration” study there are a number of other flawed understandings of how airlines really operate, how consumers choose which airlines to fly, and, most importantly, what’s the main driver of flight delays in the first place.