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I love* that Delta is now charging $25 for any additional carry-on bags. Your first one is free.

Who needs to save money flying slower when you can just charge more for sh!t service and delayed flights.

Living in a Delta hub sucks

Flying slower? The same works in your car too. Driving to work nearly 20 miles a day on the freeway in decreasing my cruising speed from 70mph to 60mph (limit is 65) has risen my average distance between fill-ups from 350 to 460mpg. I can’t say I’ve noticed a difference in the time I get to work either. You guys should do a post about ‘hypermiling’ – try it too if you haven’t already – it’s actually kind of fun :)

I read in a mag a couple of months ago that (I think) Alaskan Airlines had reconfigured the layout of kiosks, check-in desks and queues in their terminal in (I think) Anchorage. Not only did it dramatically reduce check-in times, but obviated the need to build a new terminal altogether.

Not a minor change, but minor compared to building a new terminal.

How ‘bout American’s long-standing tradition of not painting their aircraft, which makes them lighter and saves fuel.

http://www.americanwaymag.com/aw/issue/vantage_point.asp?archive_date=1/15/2004

In one of Gerald Weinberg’s books, probably The Secrets of Consulting, there’s the apocryphal story of the giant multinational hamburger chain where some bright MBA figured out that eliminating just three sesame seeds from a sesame-seed bun would be completely unnoticeable by anyone yet would save the company $126,000 per year. So they do it, and time passes, and another bushy-tailed MBA comes along, and does another study, and concludes that removing another five sesame seeds wouldn’t hurt either, and would save even more money, and so on and so forth, every year or two, the new management trainee looking for ways to save money proposes removing a sesame seed or two, until eventually, they’re shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more.

Those same consultants that Ian refers to must have worked with American Airlines back in 1987, saving them $40,000 by removing one olive from all the salads in the on-board meals.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2005/06/09/business/09frills.html

I worked for a manufacturing company that had a huge number of buildings spread over several acres.

An undergraduate discovered that by adding a device to each urinal in the male toilets they could save £40,000 per year by not flushing at night when only security personnel were on site.

Um….there’s a problem with this argument. The “size” of the tweaks is only stated in absolute terms. The total savings of $160 million described in the first linked article amount to 0.7% of AMR (American’s parent corporation)’s annual revenue for 2007.

The $4 million hailed in the first quote offer a whopping 0.017% savings relative to 2007 annual revenue.

Acc. to the US Bureau of Transport Statistics, commercial air travel required 13,458,000,000 gallons of jet fuel in 2006. American’s reduction by 84,000,000 gallons (in the first linked article) would amount to 0.6% percent of that.

Statistics are a powerful tool, when used properly. Unfortunately, in the media they are almost always misused in ways that overdramatize the importance of the points being made, for PR reasons or just to make a story sound more significant than it is.

Constant And Never-ending Improvement (CANI) is a precept that I live by. Pays big dividends because it’s like compound interest.

Any else recognize “CANI” and living by it?

Not a small change, but Starrports redesign airports to create fuel savings for every plane that takes off or lands. http://www.usatoday.com/news/graphics/starrport/flash.htm

On the other hand, as Jim Jeffers pointed out, the percentage gains in fuel savings if drivers would just slow down on the freeways are huge. He reports a 31% decrease in fuel consumption. I’ve had about a 12% decrease by going from driving 75 or so avg. to 65.

Airlines are already at the point where they’ve optimized their fuel consumption so that it’s hard to make all but the tiniest incremental changes. But drivers aren’t.

Multiply the savings Jim & I have experienced by the hundreds of millions of American drivers, and every day we could save more fuel than American Airlines is saving annually with these measures. It’s up to you, folks.

My sense is that the most successful companies know when/how to make the big bold leaps, but also know the importance of fine-tuning the model as they go (collecting the low-hanging fruit). e.g. Apple transformed the music retail business w/ the launch of iTunes, and keeps tweaking (obsessively?) to optimize the experience, enabling it to stay well ahead of competitors.

@ AndrewH: Living in a Delta hub sucks

Tell me about it. I just paid $1,429 for a round trip from Cincinnati to DC for late May. Last month, I paid over $700 to fly Cincinnati to Nashville (a 4 hour drive) while a coworker paid $129 for the same trip from Chicago to Nashville.

Boo hoo for the poor airlines.

But to counter Ian and Mark, sometimes the things that are being taken away are completely pointless – take Southwest and their trash bag logo …

link

”...low hanging fruit”

Thanks for giving me a reason for an early Friday afternoon shot.

“I love reading about little changes that make a big difference. The airline industry seems to be a great example.”

The airline industry is so terrible that any small positive change would make a big difference. They can only go up.

The arguments about fuel consumption in cars is more relevant IMO . As drivers, we can do a number of things to reduce fuel consumption. The easiest option has already been stated- drive slower. Is it any wonder that we didn’t have a fuel crisis until the national speed limit was raised from 55 to 65? I didn’t see why we needed to raise the speed limit since most people (at least those that I know) drive +10 over speed limit anyway. Reducing the speed limit to 60 or even back to 55 mph will have a big (positive) impact on our fuel dependency.

This is precisely what the concept of Leverage Points is all about.

Flying 8 minutes slower saved the airline $535.

However, it cost perhaps 200 passengers each 8 minutes of their life, not even by shortening it byt forcing them into a an airplane seat after a 8-hour flight.

Assuming that their average hourly salary might be perhaps $30, it cost them together $800, more than the airplane saved.

This calculation does make many assumptions (that they did not work in the plane, nor were going to “waste” the time later), and does not consider the environmental cost of fuel use, but the point still remains: Little tweaks that save you money can also make huge numbers of other people slightly less happy.

I would indeed be willing to pay my $3 share of the extra fuel cost to get the flight over with 8 minutes quicker.

Adding an extra 5 minutes or even ten minutes to any flight would be accepted by the majority of airline passengers as long as it was translated into fare savings for the public.

However I doubt that this will transpire!

Hey Mattias! Nice!

You’d spend the three bucks to help speed the human race to any earlier demise just so you can get somewhere 8 minutes earlier? I didn’t read time and money as the ‘point’ here. More like using ‘less’. No?

We’d better keep out of the way on the freeway when you’re about too, I guess.

Johnnyc, as I said, I did not consider environmental impacts in my calculation. Of course flying slower and using less fuel is better for the planet, and I even support driving and flying slower for that reason.

What I was arguing though was that those little tweaks that can result in huge savings are often the result of making other people slightly less well off. And over all the affected persons this can add up to much more than the savings.

To move away from the tangential issue of pollution and back to economics, let’s consider the “remove 3 sesame seeds” case. I assert that if the buyers were given a choice, they would choose to pay for those 3 seeds.

You’re safe on the freeway, I cycle to work :)

By the way, based on various data sources online about 767 fuel use, I calculated that the extra fuel used in those 8 minutes would be 1.3 gallons per passenger. Do you drive slower than the speed limit on the freeway to save that amount?