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Southwest Airlines Is Doing Away With Pneumatic Tubes, Paper Tickets (consumerist.com)
As part of Southwest's biggest tech upgrade in its 45 years of existence, the company will doing away with several of its antiquated practices, including paper tickets and the use of pneumatic tubes to send messages at airports. Consumerist reports: The airline says the goal of these upgrades is to keep planes moving in and out of airports as quickly as possible. "We're looking for minutes," Chief Operating Officer Mike Van de Ven told Bloomberg. "How do I save a minute here, a minute there? In 2017, we are more deliberate in our continuous improvement efforts." The new reservation system will allow Southwest to accept foreign money -- something its rivals can already do -- bounce back faster from storms, and have more control over price changes and schedules. Ramp workers will be getting tablets with real-time information to speed up airplanes' "turn time" -- how quickly they can deboard and reboard passengers and take off again. Tarmac staffers also won't be using pneumatic tubes anymore to send notes via canister about lost luggage and other communications to the cargo workers in charge of calculating jet weight and balance. Digital transmissions will replace that system, as well as printouts for workers who transport bags to and fro. Customers will be seeing changes as well, as the new reservation system means Southwest can ditch paper tickets altogether and stick with electronic tickets only.
Both the pneumatic tubes and the paper tickets.
it took a 5 year project I presume!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Pneumatic tubes were state of the art 160-odd years ago, so you could say "time for change". And the spirit of the times has it that the more electronic everything, the more automated, ICTified, digitalised, digitally transformed, or whatever the buzzword is this week, it must be automatically better, right?
Well, no. Why does "accept foreign currency" depend on not using pneumatic tubes? One'd think that it's much easier to transport foreign notes to the back office using a tube than scanning it or something. Or, you know, walking. We don't have zippy zappy star trek transporters yet. So the argumentation is a little silly, and that means that the real story is something else. We're seeing an attempt to "projectize" themselves out of some corporate inertia swamp. That's the real story.
I for me think that's fine and dandy but be careful not to throw out the good with the bad. Electronic-only boarding passes? How am I supposed to hold those? So they're now requiring me to carry a mobile phone or tablet just to hold that ticket? Doesn't seem a good idea to me. Especially since the TSA might^Wwill seize the thing if I don't allow them to take a complete copy of everything that's on it.
So I don't really care what this here airline, or any other airline, wants to do internally. I do care as soon as I have to bow and scrape to their internal procedures, moreso when that exposes me to entirely avoidable risk. Are they going to give out loaner tablets for the tickets maybe? If they want to be all-electronic-everything-rainbow-fartsy, then they shall have to. Bet they didn't think about that at all.
By the time they get rid of the pneumatic tubes for tickets for people, Elon Musk will be selling tickets for pneumatic tubes for people...
I love digital tickets, but sometimes, on long journeys, i like the reassurance of having a paper ticket in case anything happens to my phone.
Ever tied to scan an eTicket off a phone or tablet? It sucks! Since the screen is not locked when tilted down to scan the code touching the screen causes the code to shift or go away entirely. The scanner light also generates quite a bit of glare on the smooth screens making readout even more difficult. Each time I or others used eTickets the gate attendant had to manually type in the clear code, which takes considerable amounts of time.
The only way to get consistently good and fast readouts is by printing the eTicket, essentially giving yourself a paper ticket. That would not be that big of a problem if it wasn't for the bizarre restrictions of airlines to only allow printing of the ticket 24 hours in advance. Good luck when traveling as it requires either a decent hotel or an Internet Cafe with printer nearby.
If Southwest and others want to speed things up, either come up with a better means to scan from mobile devices or allow for printing the eTicket for any leg of the travel several days ahead of first departure.
Somewhere in Russia, a team of hackers are licking their chops.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I've never flown Southwest, but don't most people pay by credit/debit card these days?
Credit/debit cards work just fine in foreign countries and foreign currency.
I was once traveling in Portugal, and was explaining to my grandfather that it was easy to take money out of a local bank machine. This was 1995.
What happens when Granny can't get an e-ticket to work on her Jitterbug flip-phone? Paper tickets will still exist as a fallback - or at least printouts of an e-ticket made at the service counter.
How many times a month will IT take down your Windows domain controller for maintenance? I think I'd rather have a pneumatic tube system than modern Ethernet.
AMERICA) is the FrreBSD's juggernaut either fu3king numbers,
So they're replacing one system of tubes with another system of tubes?
I'm not sure if it's like this everywhere, but it seems like all of the large Texas corporations are extremely slow at adopting new technology and are struggling to compete with the modern world. I work for one and we struggle to make 5 updates to our web site per year....and that's with dozens of employees and contractors doing work.
I work in the airline IT world. "Paper tickets" aren't the paper boarding passes you print out at the kiosk. These are actual tickets issued at travel agents or airport ticket counters, and go back to a time when you could buy a ticket independent of a reservation or seat assignment. In fact, travel agents used to be able to manually hand-write them and the only thing keeping them secure was that ticket stock was controlled. It's similar to buying a train ticket for a commuter railroad from the machine at the station...unless you're reserving a seat, you can exchange it for a seat on whatever train you get on. Same went for paper tickets -- if you had a ticket that said "JFK to LAX" you could go to the airport and check in on any flight if you had an open reservation.
The article mentions that they're doing this to get rid of paper buddy passes, which really are the only paper tickets most domestic airlines deal with these days. It's incredibly rare to process paper tickets for passengers these days.
Beau, are you to busy sucking on some DICE individuals that you cant realize the crap your posting??
Once again How is this newz for Nerdz?
"the consumerist" Fucking please.
its people like u whom are killing this publication
Well, that sucks!
Have gnu, will travel.
Looks like their replacing their pneumatic tubes with those internet tubes that get clogged with emails.
Ah, pneumatic tubes. Explains this bizarre label I saw taped to the wall at a Southwest get at LAX: https://twitter.com/isonno/sta...
All the time I have been flying the longest time seems to be the time it takes for people to get into the plane and sit down. Apparently a large percentage will block the aisle while stowing their hand luggage, taking off jacket, taking out hand luggage again to find the phone charger, etc etc.
Same on exit.
Would be nice to have new eyes on this process.
It's a bug? I thought it's a long time feature.
Does this mean that my seat will not get smaller (again)?!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.