TRY Flying the Friendly Skies

Note: sequel article is here

You have your passport in order.  Cleared your schedule, paid hard-earned money, and booked a flight.  Brought appropriate travel attire (we all now know yoga pants are not up to snuff in these parts).  Arrived at the airport hours in advance.  Checked-in, and paid more money to have your bags come with.  Snaked through the security labyrinth.  Shoes off, and your junk out in a sheer Ziploc.  Praying for no delays, no terror, no accidents.  Finally you wedge into your seat and just breathe.  You are savoring the American dream... wait, what the heck is this?  The in-flight entertainment has already started: and you're it.  Armed re-accommodation honchos rush aboard and viciously drag you off, scratching and pleading, suddenly behaving like a hunted animal in a third world country.  And that’s how they roll at United Airlines.  One of the world’s largest carriers whose slogan at one point was unintentionally miswritten as “it’s time to fly”.  When we all know the executives meant, “it’s time to cry”.  Just how bad is it?  What is the chance the next hapless passenger we all stare at on evening TV, is you?  Despondently, overbookings are so systematically high that involuntary bumpings (often without accommodation) are at every airline, quarter after quarter for as far as the eye can see.  Today wasn’t some odd outlier where operations went bad.  “Today” is a crisis happening to 3 American passengers hourly, all year long!  Today we only happened to see it tossed about on social media, but 70 others just here in the 50 states today also were victimized and we never heard about it.  The more you and your family fly some airlines, there is a decent chance this unfortunate event will also happen to you.

This chart shows not only how every airline experiences involuntary ejections from boarding, but the same pattern exists quarter after quarter for years, and the consistency of these ranks remain over that period.  So Delta happens to have the least chance of a forced off passenger, per transportation department.  Yet on the other extreme, JetBlue passengers have a 14x greater probability of experiencing a required flight bump!  Those are massive probabilistic differences in the undesirable fate one might experience just based upon carrier, and a signal of the fare differential that would be expected to close such a gap.

For the time being, most Americans can be assumed to experience the composite rate shown on the chart.  Which is an airline quarterly odds ratio of 1 in 11 thousand booked passengers.  But how do we convert this to your individual odds of being pushed off?  Basically if you fly quarterly for the main part of your adult life (say 50 years), then the chance is:

100%-[100%-(1/11000)]⁴*⁵⁰ = 2%

But if you bump that up to say one flight monthly on JetBlue, then the odds suddenly explode to something less than the approximation of 2x the JetBlue ejection rate and 3x likely when switching to monthly versus quarterly.  It’s not pretty, by design.  Or something along the lines of less than 2%*2*3 (only because you will not be up for all expelled seats but only one per flight and the survival rate slows exponentially so for both reasons we are less than 12%):

2*[100%-(100%-2%)³] = 9%

 

 

April 13 update from readers/followers: see compelling consumer-experience, contextual data below.