Oh Airports, You Damned Nuisances

Dear Mr. Bestselling Novelist,

I was thoroughly illuminated by your post on the stupidity that goes on in Indian airports. Brilliant analysis and clever solutions, and I am grateful to you for offering them. But as a well educated, logical person like you would accept that the best solutions have all one thing in common- they are feasible. So let us see how your solutions measure up to small feasibility tests. Let us start with the most obvious one first:

The Printed Out Ticket Nuisance: Let me start by agreeing with you that printed tickets are troublesome to carry around. You have to run around looking for printouts, you have to remember to carry them, if are on a multi-city trip, you have to hunt through sheaves of tickets to find out the right one, and you are not being very eco-friendly. But should we do away with them totally? Printed tickets are convenient for the guy who checks them. There do not have to be phones passing from hand to hand, there is no time wasted in searching for tickets every time a back button is pressed accidentally (it happens all the time, remember, even with highly tech savvy people) , there is no stress on the guy checking the tickets to familiarize himself with different kinds of screens-an A4 sized paper is a uniform screen. And let us face it, an A4 size document, or even half of it. And the relevant parts- your name, the name of the airline you are flying, the number of your flight, date of your flight, departure time usually do cover almost half the page- this can be remedied and standard formats set, but till then, think of the poor chap who is supposed to check all this on your 3 inch blackberry screen. Hell, I dare you to do it on the smartphone you use day-in day-out, in a time faster than the time it takes for him to process all that information from a piece of paper. Another small point- phones pass on from hand to hand, they drop sometimes. When they drop, sometimes they break. Who pays for such incidences? In 2010-11, nearly 30million people passed through Mumbai airport alone. That is a hell of a lot of phones to check. Can you imagine the level of damages that will need to be paid, and the suits that will be filed if even a fraction of a fraction of those simple phone-dropping-and-breaking mishaps happen? (We are, of course, in even considering this line of thought, going by the assumption that those 30 million people were all owners of smart phones capable of showing e-tickets on their screens. Pretty big assumption, don't you think?)

So, the point, Mr. Bestselling Novelist, isn’t that the terrorist is going to make a spelling mistake. It is to check if a ticket is valid, and the person carrying that ticket is the person for whom the ticket was issued. You would agree that it is required, and I would say that yes, when available, phones ‘should’ be allowed as display devices for tickets. But your argument to do away with the paper entirely? Oh well…

The Baggage Tag: That big-bag, small-bag example, bwahahahaha! Thank you for making my day.

The Food: I agree with your point about the snack shop. It is inconvenient, it would be best if we could order food on the ground. The airlines do take food orders, on the ground, you know. Or during ticket booking. 

The Missing Runways: This is a very interesting one. I like where you are going with your argument, here. Aircraft land on runways, too many aircrafts take too long to land during peak hours because runways are not clear. Ergo, we need more runways. Preferably, one for every aircraft that lands at an airport. I know this is an absurd, overly simplistic distortion of your line of thought. But who started it?  I am sure Occam’s bones are shrivelling in whatever crypt they lie in. 

There is a word in English, called optimization. It is a heavily overused word in business circles, and causes lots of sniggers, but you know what, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to optimize. Here is why: You can make more and more runways. But they require something to make. Got it right the first time- they need resources to make. You know, land, money, labour- the kind of stuff that is not in infinite supply. And it doesn’t really stop here. Aircraft do not live on runways. They live in hangars. People do not get out at runways, they get out at terminals. So, things like more terminals, more access roads, more buses to ferry people, more people to tinker around all the aircrafts that are on the ground. And, most cussedly, more ground itself. Land. Very limited. And the worst part is, your resource requirement is not over once you have them. You have to pay to maintain them in working order. So, while it would be nice to have those extra 20 minutes to tweet if I land earlier due to absence of air traffic congestion, it might not be the best use of resources.

There is another thing: the problem is congestion, not lack of capacity. (I understand that there might be a lack of capacity, but to make that claim requires much more analysis of data and more detailed thought in how the resources available can be best utilized). So, congestion. That is a problem that can be reduced by some smarter thinking instead? Maybe more flights in the off peak hours would help? I know airlines wouldn’t like it initially, passengers wouldn’t like it initially, but none of them like the congestion either. And you are talking about running an airport, not winning an election.

I will leave it here, but I would like to make a disclaimer: the point I was trying to make above was not about your arguments, your complaints and the validity or non-validity of them. My point was about the thought process that needs to go behind solutions that we propose. The most simplistic way might not always be the smartest, and what mostly seems like an inconvenience forced upon us, might sometimes have good reasons.

And one last thing: If millions of people were going  to read what I write, then I would put some thought behind what I wrote, so that I did not end with my foot in my mouth too often.

Thanks and love and all that.