Stranded? Who pays when air travel breaks

Patrick McKenzie (0:02)

Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does.

Hi, everyone. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11 on the Internet. This past weekend, I was at Overhang, a conference in Washington DC, which brought San Francisco Bay Area AI insiders together with policy makers and other people professionally involved in AI policy in Washington for the purpose of helping out with mutual understanding, which is not the topic of this episode. The topic of this episode is air travel infrastructure and the financialization of failures of it. Because on Monday, September 21st, the day I was supposed to go home to my family, there was something of a mishap next to what appears to be an Amtrak rail line on the Eastern seaboard. And that resulted in cutting a single point of failure, fiber optic cable, which took down air traffic control over a large portion of the Eastern United States, which had some important consequences and some less important ones. One of the least important consequences was that my flight home to Chicago, connecting through Detroit, had what's called a misconnect. In the middle of the day, a misconnect is when we predict that your time into the airport that you're going to have the layover at will not successfully get you on the plane that you were expected to board there. And so the airline offered a rebooking. I then rebooked to a different flight from Atlanta late in the evening, transiting through Atlanta, and then had a second misconnect and ended up staying overnight at a hotel. Somewhat surprisingly to me, the airline told me, well, we're not going to actually pay for that. In the first encounter that I had with them, they said that they only pay for it if it is their fault that someone is delayed overnight, and they said, well, the air traffic control issue is out of our hands.

And interestingly, there are about five different regimes that govern whether a customer is made whole in the case of airline or aircraft-oriented travel disruption. So I thought I would talk through what is essentially the lost waterfall between those regimes, both from a perspective of, well, this is intellectually interesting, and also from a perspective of, this can actually save you money if you know how to do it well. So I'll start off with the usual dangerous professional injunction. Dangerous professional, if you haven't followed my writing on this for the last couple of years, is kind of this somewhat winking way to describe the type of person who keeps careful notes with the intention of eventually bringing them to the attention of people in positions of authority.

It does help to have sort of a dangerous professional when dealing with airline staff and other people that you're dealing with in the course of a travel disruption. However, in many cases of being a dangerous professional, you're trying to maximize for the sort of expected value of a interaction like a regulatory intervention or a suit or similar, or your counterparties sort of worry about the expected value of a regulatory intervention or a simple suit. This is not true with respect to airline disruptions because a travel disruption is so routine and regimented. And so the thing that you're trying to assume the persona of the dangerous professional for is just to be efficient with how you deal with people and to route the questions to the right layer of the bureaucracy such that you get satisfaction very quickly and hopefully at a low stress. The other thing I would mention is that this sort of thing does not have to be resolved at the airport.

Which is something of a surprise for people. They might assume that, well, after the airline finally gets you home, you and the airline are even, which is not even close to true. But the sort of general strategy one would have is to keep moving at the airport during a travel disruption, keep attempting to use self-service tools and similar to rebook you onto the available flights on the same carrier, and then you kind of only accept being paused when that will result in a much better outcome for you. This also tends to help travelers that are well capitalized and similar, that can pay for a night in the hotel confident in the knowledge that somebody will reimburse them for the night in the hotel later. That simply is what it is. There is no necessity that the structure that we have built maximizes for fairness across the panoply of people of different financial statuses, sophistications, et cetera, et cetera. And indeed, there is going to be much talk in discussing the redress waterfall and how the anticipated cost of redress on behalf of the airline and insurance companies and others that are involved here is predicated on very many people not optimally enforcing rights or contractual obligations that are owed them. So, let's go to the waterfall. Many things can cause a travel disruption, and if you're the AITA, which is an international association, you've tried to cram down that complexity of millions of things that could possibly go wrong into one of about 40 or so documented numeric codes. A lot of the industry will type those codes into a system somewhere and then get them squished through other systems which evaluate those codes and maybe do some sort of recursive graph look up on other flights involved in itinerary, etc., etc. to compress them down to one of a very small number of human legible reasons that the plane was delayed. And so at one point, someone tried to claim to me that my travel was disrupted as a result of the aircraft coming in being late, where might have been true as they understood it in the moment, but institutionally, the airline believes that it was affected by an air traffic control issue downstream of that unfortunate backhoe incident, as I mentioned earlier.