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Enter your Email here. Ways to Donate. GERCHICK: Well, some believe that that has to do with the amount of oxygen that gets to the brain and via the lungs and so forth, and that has to do with pressurization of the aircraft. The airplanes don't simulate the experience of being at sea level.
When you're in an airplane, obviously you're not at sea level, but the aircraft compensates to some degree for the altitude at which you're sitting in your chair by essentially pressurizing the aircraft, basically forcing the air into a pressure point so that the oxygen density is increased, and it goes to your brain, and so you feel more comfortable. So right now the altitude, the virtual altitude of most aircraft, when you're in that airplane, is about 8, feet.
So it's as though you're kind of, you know, you're floating 3, feet above Denver or maybe at the level of Flagstaff. And that can create mild hypoxia. That is not as much oxygen, as much as you'd like, getting to your systems.
And that creates discomfort. New aircraft, like the and the A, are attempting to lower that virtual altitude by increasing the pressurization inside the airplane. So now you'll feel like it's more like 5, or 6, feet, which is, you know, basically a Denver-level altitude. People feel more comfortable, they feel less headaches, and they feel - according to the manufacturers, anyway.
And this is, by the way, made possible by some significant technological innovations in these airplanes. Basically what they've done is they've created a new kind of shell for the airplane, made out of carbon composites, instead of aluminum. The has this, and the new A has some of this. Basically what that means is they can pressurize that cabin more so that you feel more comfortable, a little less of that sense of hypoxia and drowsiness and head-achiness ph , and they can do that.
One of the frustrations of flying now is that, you know, you pay for your ticket, you think you have a price, and they you realize now you're first going to pay fees on top of that, fees for everything from checking a bag to if you want extra legroom you can pay extra for that.
You can pay extra to get into a speedier line at check-in or security. What are some of the other things you can pay fees for? Oh yes, if you think you're getting a free frequent flyer mile ticket, you're going to pay GROSS: You're going to pay a fee in order to be able to buy it, and if you have to cancel it, and you want your miles back, you pay a fee for that, too.
Why do the airlines rely so much on fees now? This is a relatively new, quote, innovation. The fees now make the difference between, or have made the difference between, profit and loss.
So it's a huge dollar number. They rely on this because raising fares is very difficult. In some senses this is a competitive industry, and people who go on the Internet, which is where most people are now buying their tickets, may put their routing in and see who's offering that routing, which airline is offering to fly them from Point A to Point B. So nobody wants to be the high-fare entity. However, there's not much competition on fees. So there may be price wars but not bag fee wars.
So it's a way of charging more without showing a fare that's different. Fees also have other advantages. Some of them are not subject to the 7. So there are a variety of issues why fees are really better in some ways than fares for airlines. The fee for booking through an agent instead of online. That's a common one now, too. GERCHICK: Well, how about the fee for talking to a human being to make your ticket or new fees for if you want to put your carryon in the overhead carryon bin, that'll cost you 50 bucks on some airlines now, or approximately that.
GROSS: You know, you write that one of the reasons why airlines have come to rely on fees is, you know, they do need the extra money, and one of the reasons why dates back to , when there was a big hike in jet fuel prices, and that was really bad for the airlines.
How do the jet fuel prices now compare to in terms of their impact on the industry? The fuel prices are - have stabilized to some degree at a high level, and they continue to be a - probably the largest, actually the largest part of the cost of operating an airline.
In they rose to about 40 percent of the cost of operating the airline, which was just a huge number. Now the airlines have found a business model which in essence is allowing them to respond to huge fee increases while still making a profit. The airlines have found that I think the head of the Airlines for America, the trade association, economist recently said that fuel costs are no longer a threat to survival, they're a threat to earnings.
And that's more or less what's going on here. The way that airlines have been able to do it is with fees and with fare increases. Fares have gone up in the last three or four years, probably some 20 percent over that period of time, and by constraining the number of flights and seats they're putting in the air. They essentially discovered the law of supply and demand, and that's been a very powerful way of keeping fares up in the airline industry.
So essentially they have found something of an antidote to the problem of fuel costs. The ticket price that you pay to get from here to there is going to depend on what day you call, how many seats have already been booked, and they tell you when you make your reservation, like if you're lucky enough to be able to put it on hold, that price might change And you describe how the airlines have divided the seats in a plane into buckets.
So explain the bucket pricing system. GERCHICK: OK, well basically about - nearly a year before that flight, there will be some geniuses at the airline who will decide that they will divide the number of available seats on that airplane into maybe a dozen or a few more what they call buckets. Each bucket contains a number of seats of different classes, different restrictions of whether you have to fly over - whether you have to stay over a Saturday night, how early you have to buy the ticket, 30 days in advance, whether it's refundable, and various other issues, and price.
Each seat on that airplane is put on one of those buckets. One will be - for example will be for tickets that you have to buy 30 days in advance of the flight.
Say if you want to fly to Disneyworld with the kids, and you're willing to buy a ticket, you know you're going to go when school's out, you're willing to make it not refundable, you're willing to stay there over a weekend, you can get a great deal.
You're in the - you will get a ticket from one of the really low-fare discount buckets. But now if you're a businessperson who has to get to a newly called meeting, say, three days from now, and you have to be there, you're willing to pay a lot more. So you're going to have to get a ticket from another bucket. That's going to be the high-end bucket.
That's going to be maybe a Y-fare bucket. Each of these buckets has associated alphanumeric names, alphabetical names. But so you're going to be paying five times what the tourist who wants to go to Disneyworld is going to be paying. So each - that airplane is full of buckets. There are a number of buckets. Once one bucket is empty, once everybody has bought up those day-in-advance tickets, there aren't any more of them.
So the next person who comes along wishing to buy a ticket will have to buy from the slightly more expensive bucket, the next bucket up. And this is the way that the airlines basically create different pricing, different products. The product of a ticket for tomorrow's flight at a convenient business time is viewed by the airlines as an entirely different product from a ticket purchased 30 days in advance to - on a nonrefundable basis.
The airline wants to sell the cheap ticket to the tourist who won't pay any more and wants to make sure that the most expensive ticket is sold to the businessperson who has to be in Philadelphia tomorrow. GROSS: The last few times I've flown, the seats have been full, which wasn't always the case, and you point out that there used to be a lot more half-empty planes than there are now. So what have the airlines learned about to fill planes? Are they just flying fewer planes and therefore the ones they are flying are more filled?
GERCHICK: Well, that's - actually that is the - the big solution is in fact to cut capacity, to fly fewer airplanes and fewer seats and essentially force people who want to travel into fuller airplanes. But I should add the crowding is probably the number one issue in terms of comfort for travelers. That is probably the biggest complaint: Airplanes are not very, very full. I think most recently for this summer, we're talking about what they call load factors, that is the percentage of seats filled by paying passengers, will be probably on the order of 87 to 90 percent on popular routes, and that means really they're going to be full because that other 10 percent is inhabited by non-revenue passengers they call them, perhaps crew that are traveling around or airline employees and so forth.
So you're basically going to face absolute full airplanes in most circumstances on popular routes at convenient times. The way they do it, again, is through this - in part through this pricing mechanism we just discussed. If there are empty seats, the airline will have a tremendous history of what's happened to that flight last year, the year before, the year before. How soon did that flight fill up? How soon did people buy the tickets for that flight? If it's two weeks before the flight, and the computer says you should have sold 75 seats, but you've only sold 60 seats, the airline can lower the fare or actually add more seats to the low-fare bucket.
But on the other hand if the flight is selling faster than they expected based on historical trends, they can maintain the high fares and expect that they're going to be able to fill every seat at the higher fare.
So this is an extraordinarily complicated kind of process, and it's one that's probably valued - probably provided some estimate five to 10 percent more revenue to the airlines just on sophisticated revenue management.
I'm Terry Gross back with Mark Gerchick, author of a new book about why air travel is often an ordeal. It's called "Full Upright and Locked Position. You mentioned that comfort is one of the biggest complaints on planes because people are so crowded together.
That's in part because the planes are full. But also, a lot of people feel like there is less legroom than there used to be on planes. Is there in fact less legroom? On some points there is. Back in the old days - probably 20 years ago - the tendency was to have about 34 inches of what's known as seat pitch. That's the distance between the back of one seat to the back of the next seat. It's basically, in the sense, in a rough sense, what you consider legroom. It's about 34 inches. Now the standard is more like 31 inches in the United States.
And some airlines, some ultra low cost airlines, have tightened even that up to about 28 inches, which is we're now approaching the limits of anatomical possibility. So you know, the more seats you can cram in, the more money you make. Just think about it. If you have a 30 row airplane and you cut just one inch of seat pitch between each seat, you can add an entire new row of paying passengers. So there is a tremendous incentive to do so. There's even talk now - not even, there's more than talk, there are new designs being thought about for making the lavatories even smaller than they are.
So that you can All right. So I'm just going to voice a pet peeve here. One of the perhaps compensatory things for the lack of legroom is that you can tilt your seat back, which doesn't give you more legroom, but I think people feel like they have more space if they do that. But that means that the person in back of that person who is tilting back not only doesn't have legroom, they also have that person's seat in their lap.
And it makes it very difficult to put down the tray; it makes it very uncomfortable for the person behind the tilted seat. And I just don't understand why airlines continue to have those seats that can tilt back when they're not giving us enough legroom to make that fair to the person behind.
But let's talk about seatbacks In fact, some of these very tight seat pitch airlines have what they call pre-reclined seats, which means they don't recline at all, basically in deference to the issue you raise.
The seatback fights have actually escalated to the point where in one case, I think a couple of years ago, a United Airlines flight to Ghana from Dulles had to turn around after there was an altercation after one person tilted his seatback all the way and the person behind slapped the head of the person who had tilted the seatback. And instead of running 5, miles out across the South Atlantic at the middle of the night, not knowing what was going on, the pilot said the heck with it and turned around, was accompanied by a couple of Fs and brought the airplane back to Dulles.
His drummer, Teddy Pendergrass , had a pretty good voice. Arctic definitively fell apart at the end of the s, and released its last record in By that time, Jimmy Bishop had disappeared entirely, and to this day nobody knows what happened, although rumors of his preaching in Mississippi have surfaced. Copyright NPR Skip to main content. Close close Donate.
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