Flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue (bbc.com)

I remember on the show Airline (docuseries about Southwest Airways) one of the passengers didn't want to fly and asked for a refund.

One of the employees was shown giving the passenger a refund of, IIRC, $27 in cash (b/c she bought the ticket in cash).

On a recent trip (when I encountered issues on every leg — cancellations, delays, missed connections, you name it), it is clear that airlines are incentivised to not communicate delays until it is clear the delay can't be recovered. In one case, at the airline's hub, the airport displays were showing a 2 hour delay and their app showed on-time departure (to the point I had to go and ask which source to trust). Having been a frequent flyer in the past I was able to determine that the delay was likely (but airlines can swap in equipment at hubs and mitigate the delay).

Once you do have a delay the ripples are complex to handle. You have some passengers that were meant to connect to other flights. You have some that won't travel at all die to the cancellation. You then have 100+ people who you somehow have to accommodate in the coming days when flight loads are hopefully already 90+%.

To be fair to my airline, their app was actually great at offering me a rebooking option the following day when my flight was cancelled. Unfortunately, the option I selected resulted in a non-direct flight with a transfer time that was impossible in reality (shouldn't have been offered in my opinion). I was literally rebooked 5mins after they declared the flight cancelled, skipped the queues back in the departure area (I don't think the local service agents even knew about the app) and drove home to my family for an extra night.

Scare quotes are an Americanism that is gaining traction her, but normally we use it for quoting speach.

It blows my mind that consumers have lots of protection from the airline, but we have no protection from ATC failures.

As it happens, flight just got cancelled.. so airline is responsible for hotel and rebook. Which is also unfair on them.

For example, I was recently at the hospital to pick up a friend who was due to be discharged that day. I arrived in their room, spoke briefly with the attending nurse who said it would be a long while before the patient was discharged (as it always is at hospitals) and sat down to wait. After a couple of hours I checked in with the nurse, who said he was waiting on the social worker. My friend noted that he had already talked to the social worker, and despite her insistence, said that he didn't want or need any sort of nursing or in-home care after discharge. When the nurse heard this, he went back, printed up the discharge papers and we were soon on our way.

Why did this happen? Because job of the social worker is to push the hospital/network's post-discharge nursing and rehab system. Once this was turned down, she had no incentive to stay involved or update the discharge status. The busy nurse had no incentive to pro-actively scrutinize the forms and decide the patient was ready for discharge. The hospital itself (as an organization) had no incentive to speed up the discharge, as they were making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from his excellent insurance coverage.

If we had just sat around, and said nothing, we almost certainly would have been there for several more hours, until the next shift of nurses came in and reviewed the patient files. Sometimes you are just screaming into the void but many times it helps to speak up.

It doesn't have to be that way. Here's Haley Dragoo, former head of the New York Subway's "Twitter Division".[1] She had the sense to insist on a desk in the Rail Control Center, so she could know what was really going on. Down on the working floor, too, not up in the gallery overlooking the control room. She was a few meters from the people directly running the subway.

Her point was that the MTA was "good at monologues" but didn't interact well. So she posted on the MTA's Twitter account, several hundred times a day. If someone asked a serious question, she'd answer quickly, with actual info. Not sugar-coating the info, just translating from "subway speak". (The operations people talk about location in terms of distance from a reference point at the start of the line, the signal number plate on each signal, but customers think in terms of stations.)

It's very New York to do that.

The MTA has dropped Twitter/X, though. Twitter/X wanted to bill them for using the Twitter/X API, and the MTA will not pay others to distribute their info. So now the MTA uses their own web site and app.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/nyregion/subway-mta-socia...

Sure, you can say humans made these decisions. But at scale, that seems like saying our cells choose what we do.

The result was universally dismal, these private companies "leak" sewage into previously clean waterways, avoid taxes, divert as much money as possible to their off-shore owners, and of course they insist they constantly need higher and higher charges from their captive customer audience, then "oops" the money is used to pay off wealthy investors and none of the urgently needed work gets done.

Granted, the difference in emissions of either form of traveling are absolutely nothing compared to the emissions of Eyjafjallajökull itself.