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Why airlines are like airlines

Great piece by aviation editor Scott McCartney in today’s Wall St. J., “If the World Were Run Like Airlines, Sandwich Prices Would Spike at Peak Hours and ‘Priority’ Elevators at the Hotel Would Cost Extra.” (paywall)

My first thought is, “Be patient, Scott. Give them time.”

In the meantime, here are some off-the-top-of-my-head ideas for why airlines, uniquely among modern industries, can get away with this type of pricing (comments apply to US airlines; I don’t know that much about the others):

  1. They can get away with it because there’s really not that much competition. They may look like they compete, and sometimes they do, but in fact, they’re an oligopoly. If the American-US Air merger is approved, we’ll be down to four major carriers: Delta, United, American, and Southwest.
  2. It is said that when you die and are on your way to Hell, you’ll change planes in Atlanta. Which means Delta in all probability, giving them pricing power at the country’s busiest airport. In Chicago or Houston, it would be United. American gets Dallas.
  3. The customers they want don’t care about the irritations McCartney mentions because business and first class passengers aren’t paying bag fees. Like all industries, airlines want to make a healthy profit at a manageable risk. Easiest way to do that is cater to the folks with lots of money. You can see an obvious sign of that in the new spending requirements for elite status. You can also see the oligopoly element at work.
  4. This suggests a strategy of divvying up those who can afford premium travel. Delta, for example, will get these passengers from Atlanta and most of the South.
  5. The hollowing out of the middle class — and wait until the boomers see how much their 401Ks and interest on CDs will leave them for niceties like air travel — means fewer coach passengers and less margin from those who are left. If you run an airline, lock in your share of the high profit premium passengers now! By any means necessary (to coin a phrase).
  6. Southwest may be a special case and could be where all the coach passengers, those who can afford more than a bus, end up. I don’t know how many that will be, even for Southwest (if they choose to go this route). Southwest started off competing against the bus, but recently they’ve been making eyes at business travelers, too. JetBlue started off in an all-coach configuration, too, but is now adding business class (with mini-suites, no less).
  7. Over time, this will lead to a shrinking down of at least the legacy industry to a luxury provider for those who can afford to pay the price, as I suggested in an earlier post. Because we don’t have much in the way of alternatives in this country for long distance travel, I can only speculate what this means for our continued prosperity.
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Standing on our own two feet

Or not.  I’ve taken up yoga in my old age, both to complement tightness from running and to generally improve posture, breathing, awareness, and relaxation. Sure wish I’d started it about 20 years ago instead after I was 60. Still, 60 is better than 70. Yoga is one activity / philosophy that you can continue to practice as long as you can breathe, so I figure it’s time to get going on it.

SirsasanaThe headstand still needs some work, but it’s coming along. [Click for a larger view, if you promise not to laugh.]  Got a little cocky this morning, let my concentration slip for a millisecond or two, and fell out of it. Typically when that happens you just pull your legs down and do a backwards roll. Problem is that at my age, my inner ears don’t recover as quick as they used to, and I stay queasy for a few minutes. This is also the reason I had to give up roller coasters and probably wouldn’t be any too great as a fighter pilot, either. That and other things.

There are deep parallels between yoga and Boyd’s framework and not just the emphasis on flexibility. In fact, Boyd hardly ever mentions “flexibility” — once in Patterns, on chart 149, for example. Even “flexible” only shows up twice in Patterns, on charts 88 and 128. Somehow, though, you know that Boyd and flexibility are intimately related, but that’s not exactly the connection I have in mind.

More on this later. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on the subject, please jump in. By the way, I don’t have any information that Boyd ever practiced yoga himself or read much about it. He did take up power walking after he moved to Delray Beach. He also claimed to have a pet alligator.

Namaste.

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Happy Father’s Day 2013

GC Richards MukdenHere’s a picture of my late father, Grover C. Richards (he dropped “Jr.” when his father died) taken in Mukden, Manchuria, September 1945. He’s on the far right, along with another POW and two of the Soviet soldiers who liberated their camp. Click for a larger view.

Dad was captured on Corregidor in May 1942, after the fall of Bataan. He was awarded the Silver Star for bravery for actions in the Bataan campaign. He retired from the Army in 1961, got his Ph.D., and retired again as Chair of the Psychology Department at Georgia Southern College, as it was then known, in 1981. He died in 1996.

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Cheetahs — inside your OODA loops

Bad news if you’re an antelope, but in that case, probably something you already knew.

It isn’t just speed. Sure, the cheetah is the fastest mammal, but its 60 mph dash capability primarily gets it into position, into the envelope. If speed were all there was to it, there would be a lot of overshoots.

The key to the endgame is agility. As the New York Times explains it in “Cheetahs’ Secret Weapon: A Tight Turning Radius“:

But it turns out that speed is not the secret to their prodigious hunting skills: a novel study of how cheetahs chase prey in the wild shows that it is their agility — their skill at leaping sideways, changing directions abruptly and slowing down quickly — that gives those antelope such bad odds.

In Boyd’s framework, a tight turning radius per se would be “maneuverability,” not agility.  But terms like “abruptly” certainly add a flavor of agility, which more properly is the ability to transition from one maneuver to another more rapidly than an opponent.

But are cheetahs operating inside antelopes’ OODA loops? Are they changing the situation more rapidly than antelopes can comprehend, thereby achieving the intention of Patterns 132:

Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos … to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse.

I don’t know. Guess we’ll have to wait for more research.

 

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After the Storm

A sharp line of thunderstorms rolled across us about 7:30 last night leaving only minor tree damage in our area and some much needed rain. At around 8:30 I noticed a bright orange glow out our west-facing windows, ran outside into the last tailings of the storm, and took this picture. Ten minutes later, it was pitch black.

Fortunately my iPhone is in a water-resistant case.

After The Storm

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My copy of Contempo has arrived!

Just got here today: my February 1, 1932 edition of Contempo. No, the Post Office wasn’t that slow; I bought it off eBay (and the USPS was right on time).

I ran across this footnote in the life of William Faulkner while attending my daughter’s graduation from UNC last month.  Minter’s 250-page bio, for example, doesn’t even mention that Faulkner visited Chapel Hill, much less that he contributed to this journal, and neither does his Wikipedia entry. The librarian at the university’s Southern Historical Collection, learning of my interest in Faulkner, retrieved their copy from the files, and I bought this one from John LaPine in Chicago (5 stars, by the way).

contempo_front_pageWhat is known is that the author visited Chapel Hill in October for at least three days (there is some controversy over the exact length of his visit), stayed drunk most of the time, and upon sobering up, learned that he had agreed to contribute to this journal, published by a couple of UNC students. It was a most unusual periodical, founded by a couple of young communists who also finagled pieces from such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Elliot, and Sinclair Lewis. The primary owner later moved to New York and became a highly successful stockbroker while never renouncing his left wing views. But that’s another story. (Click for a larger image)

The entire 2/1/1932 edition is credited to Faulkner, who gave the publication some poems and a short story that he hadn’t placed in more prestigious (and profitable) publications. Despite his binges, Faulkner was at the peak of his creative powers, having already published The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, having the manuscript for Light in August (my favorite) with him, and with his masterpiece Absalom! Absalom! only four years in the future. One of Contempo’s editors presciently wrote that Faulkner was “the most creative, most original and most potential writer that America has produced.” Such an opinion of Faulkner was not widely shared at that time, but 17 years later, he would win the Nobel Prize.

I had been living in Oxford about a year when the author died, so it’s possible that I saw him. I have no such memories, but I do have an original of the February 1, 1932 edition of Contempo and that will have to do.

[Note: the information on Faulkner in Chapel Hill and his association with Contempo is from “A week or 3 days in Chapel Hill: Faulkner, Contempo, and their contemporaries,” Jim Vickers, North Carolina Literary Review, Vol I, No 1, 1992. Available on-line from the NCLR site.]

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Was the war really fought over oil?

The claim is often made that we invaded Iraq in 2003 to secure our access to its oil reserves, or, more cynically, to secure the profits of US energy-related companies. To me this policy made sense, at least in the short term. It was morally reprehensible and would probably hurt us in the long run but at least I could understand it. It made a lot more sense than the reasons the Bush administration announced: non-existent WMDs, non-existent cooperation between Saddam and Osama bin Laden,  and fulfilling the non-existent desires of the Iraqi masses to adopt electoral democracy and become close allies of the United States.

If securing access to oil were our real strategy, I would have expected us to cordon off the oil fields, empty the region of its indigenous inhabitants, and pump the place dry. As I said, morally reprehensible but a coherent strategy. We didn’t do that, of course. So perhaps we had a more sophisticated plan to achieve the same results? If so, it didn’t work very well. The average price of a barrel of domestic crude in 2002 in March 2013 dollars was $29.49. For 2012, it was $87.68. So we invested some $3 trillion (up from the original estimate of $80 billion), and what we got for it was a tripling of oil prices. Some bargain. Continue reading →

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Richards’s Conjecture on Truth and Beauty

Somewhere in my college days, we read Aristotle. I recall that he droned on about truth and beauty, but for the life of me, I have no clue about what he said. Or maybe I’m just recovering snatches from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Regardless, as a defrocked mathematician, I have an ambivalence towards these two notions. This may strike you as strange, “beauty” not often associated with mathematics, so let me explain. In mathematics, we work from guesses called “conjectures,” which we then try to establish by a finite series of logical steps, reasoning from assumptions (axioms) and from results already proven to be true. Once established, they get promoted from “conjecture” to “theorem.” It all sounds so dull when you put it this way. Continue reading →