Maybe your anger is misdirected. I am glad that flight attendants are required by the FAA to have the benefit of sleep once in awhile.

Perhaps it would be better to ping the ATA management for using their resources ineffectively.

Why fly some cheese-ball airline like ATA anyway? Continental is profitable, and they don't skimp on anything.

Aren't the minimum number of flight attendant regulations designed to ensure an adequate crew for the comfort and safety of passengers? Why would you object to that?
ATA is at fault in this case for not having sufficient personnel to meet their obligations.

Yes, I'd have to agree. Both these regulations seem reasonable and I would have thought that -- in this case -- the passengers would be angry at the airline, not the FAA.

But clearly the passengers, I would wager unanimously, would have been perfectly fine with only 3 attendants. Maybe having no crew, or only one crew member would be out of the question, but this was bureaucracy getting in the way of common sense. (and should ATA have to keep an extra attendant around doing nothing for cases like this?)

And safety? Come on. How do attendants contribute to safety? With their seat belt speech? By getting customers hammered on Heineken and Champaign?

Why should the government decide the proper amount of service required? Perhaps we should require bathroom attendants in public places too. Or attendants on city buses and trains. Or in taxis. Or...

I agree -- both regulations look reasonable. Part of the duty of flight attendants is to look after passengers in the case of an emergency -- what happens if you don't have enough flight attendants ?

The airline is to blame here -- there must be enough overflow to take care of such situations. Looks like the airline did a good job of placing the blame on the FAA in this case.

(and should ATA have to keep an extra attendant around doing nothing for cases like this?)

ATA should most definitely have extra attendants around for handling weather situations or overlow situations and the like. These aren't even extraordinary, they're NORMAL situations. Maybe you can't have attendants doing nothing -- keep some around in multiple dutries -- example doing ticketing, or even have more senior employees do it. That is part of running a Customer Service operation.

And safety? Come on. How do attendants contribute to safety? With their seat belt speech? By getting customers hammered on Heineken and Champaign?

In the event of an emergency, flight attendants do have safety operations to perform.

The first rule (the 16 hour rule) looks very, very sensible to me. The 2nd rule looks OK too, although it could be a little dumb if it refers to seats, not ticketed passengers.

Yup, they seem like good rules. I find it hard to believe that -- for cases of sudden illness or family emergency -- there were NO substitute attendants to be had! Definitely bad planning on ATA's call.

Thank god a 105 pound 19 year old is looking out for me during an emergency. Otherwise i might be worried slamming into a mountain side at 400 miles per hour.

Yeah, Mark. It's true, we also have to watch out for drunk pilots with guns.

Railroads have the same rules. After 8 hours, stop the train - wherever it is - and check into a motel.

Sure, the rules are not unreasonable.

What is unreasonable is the fact that people who schedule flight assignments don't seem to have the brainpower to account for time-on-shift.

And 16 hours straight seems a little long to me. Even nurses work only 12-hour days.

(Maybe you can't have attendants doing nothing -- keep some around in multiple dutries -- example doing ticketing, or even have more senior employees do it. That is part of running a Customer Service operation.)

These attendants are NOT doing nothing. I made no argument about having useful workers around. So I don't see your point.

(In the event of an emergency, flight attendants do have safety operations to perform.)

Like what? What safety operation requires a flight attendant? Or 4 instead of 3? An example would be nice.

I wonder if there's a market for a "Flight Attendant Temps" service. With the growth in low-cost airlines, these types of situations are probably more common than they used to be, and however much the temp agency would charge for an emergency replacement has to be less than what they lose by cancelling the flight.

I wonder how much this happens. If it happens a lot the temp idea is a good one.

The rules seem fine to me. I just wish the interns at the hospitol could only work 16 hours at a time.

Paul - this is not difficult. Plane blows the landing, skids off the end of the runway, maybe catches fire. All passengers must get off the plane in a hurry. You really want coordination in such an event, hence flight attendants.

Of course, one of the flight attendants got hit in the head by a suitcase that came out of the overhead bin, another is stuck behind a bunch of people jammed in the aisle at the rear of the plane until she can get them to move, and you really want one in the plane and one at the bottom of one of the slides. Four attendants.

Dan, it sounds like what you are talking about is how to put people off libertarians -- just tell them why a large company with plenty of notice should feel entitled to blame the government when it runs into perfectly sensible safety regulations because it wants to save some money.

Say the very apologetic ATA spokespeople had announced "the management of this airline is too cheap to hire enough flight attendants. Our executives have country club memberships to pay for, you know. Sorry." At whom are the expletives directed now?

If this post had included an argument about why these regulations (or some similar regulations) are unnecessary, or not sufficiently useful to justify the occasional inconveniences they cause, or unduly burdensome for airlines for ATA, it would have been more interesting. As it is it just sounds like idle griping.

Though I suppose it is psychologically interesting that the passengers and Dan apparently default to blaming the regulation and not the airline.

Yes, I believe libertarian economists would argue that it should be left up to the consumer to decide whether a given airline is "safe", weigh the cost of the ticket vs. the probability of death, and then make an informed choice.

Not only do you get freedom from burdensome safety regulations, but you also get the opportunity of learning all sorts of arcana about which model airplane has the best safety records, which airline lets its pilots get enough rest -- your experience of choice and the resultant freedom reach new heights of libertarian ecstasy.

I am surprised that so many people pooh-pooh flight attendants as contributors to flying safety. As if they only do the annoying "buckle the seat belt" demos and serve the ever-meager offerings of food and drink. Useless, in one word.

The reason to hold such opinions is very obvious--flying has become so safe that it is rare for emergency situations to arise in the skies; furthermore if one arises it is often that the steward(ess) is powerless to do anything. Unfortunately that was mostly the case on Sept 11th.

But occasionally a "manageable" extreme situation happens. And the cabin personnel are likely the only ones trained to deal with it. And they do. And lives are saved because of it.

Have we forgotten about the Shoe Bomber stopped by a flight attendant?

How about this story of a DC-9 crash where the flight attendant undobtedly saved lives by pulling people from a crashed burning plane?

Furthermore, there are nonemergency situations (like dealing with cargo space, seat assigments and yes unruly passengers) that occur daily that can impact both pasenger airline performance and yes safety. And we better have enough cabin crew to deal with it.

Bottom line: If there's one thing I know it's that if the passenger-to-stewardess ratio goes up to 67 instead of 50, I start to panic. A ratio of 50-to-1 is safe, 50-60 is pushing it, but when you start getting well into the 60 range you're really pushing your luck. Thank God for this regulation and the lives it probably saved. Just the thought of a 67-to-1 passenger-to-stewardess ratio (meaning each stewardess is responsible for 17 EXTRA passengers) sends shivers down my spine. Daniel, you're way off base here.

A propos of this discussion, the Delta management has turned libertarian as well! (subscription link to WSJ)

Delta Air Lines, intensifying its search for ways to cut costs, is planning to reduce the number of flight attendants on some flights and eliminate meals for flight crews, according to a company document.

These attendants are NOT doing nothing. I made no argument about having useful workers around. So I don't see your point.

Your original point (see below) seemed to be that the only way ATA could have responded to a situation like this was to keep extra attendants around.

and should ATA have to keep an extra attendant around doing nothing for cases like this?)

And as I pointed out, thats not the case. There are several ways in which a manager with brains can schedule for situations like this. In fact, bad weather is very common at airports. The airline has to be able to manage that.

(Your original point (see below) seemed to be that the only way ATA could have responded to a situation like this was to keep extra attendants around.)

That is correct. Here's why. If you have people around doing other jobs that they can simply leave to hop on a plane, then the job they were doing probably wasn't worth doing. Moreover, if it was worth doing (let's say taking tickets, just as an example) how will you arrange employment for that person to take off at a moments notice? In my opinion, no matter how you arrange there will be a lot of wasted time and effort.

But the overall point is that it's a waste to even require this. And I'm somewhat shocked by the commenters who think that 1/50 is so much better than 1/67. These customers are, after all, adults. This is not a kindergarten class.

And I think Dan's ultimate point was simply that had the passengers had the option on his flight, they would have been fine with flying one attendant short. I'm quite sure that they also would have been fine flying with the overtired attendant (assuming she was OK with it) too. The passengers were denied their choice for no good reason. That's it.

That is correct. Here's why. If you have people around doing other jobs that they can simply leave to hop on a plane, then the job they were doing probably wasn't worth doing. Moreover, if it was worth doing (let's say taking tickets, just as an example) how will you arrange employment for that person to take off at a moments notice? In my opinion, no matter how you arrange there will be a lot of wasted time and effort.

And I disagree completely. I have run a customer service operation. If unexpected things happen (and in the case of weather its not even unexpected, its something that is predicted), you draw in other workers. So maybe some desk work falls a little short, maybe ticketing is a little slow, maybe some guy or gal who doesn't normally do Flight Attendant work does it. In a CRM operation, you have to schedule around. Maybe you roll up your sleeves and work yourself. I've done that. Its ABC in business management.

In the case of bad weather, you definitely plan for it. You know its going to happen in advance. If you don't do it, you're supremely incompetent. And some of these new smaller airlines don't even have the excuse that union rules might prevent re-assingment of workers.

The bottom line for me -- were the 2 rules sensible ? I think so -- the idea is to prepare for emergencies. Thats why you have co-pilots in planes too.

The Hours of Service Law for train crews requires crews to mark off twelve hours beyond their call time, with eight hours mandated rest (during busy times, that's eight hours from leaving the engine to returning to the railroad: any travel or eating time comes out of the sleeping time.) There has recently been a change in the hours of service law for over the road truckers as well.

Railroads maintain something called an "extra board" giving the order in which incoming crews will next be called -- there are no scheduled freight trains. Makes for all sorts of troubles.

Airlines attempt to maintain something resembling a schedule, with each crew member assigned to a specific flight. Reserves and extra boards, particularly on weekends, tend to be nonexistent or emptied. The downtime for aircraft and for crews tends to be midweek, if memory serves.

It would not surprise me if a low-budget carrier, particularly one with a busted budget, would have a thin extra board.

QUEEN OF SKY IS HERE TO SAVE THE DAY!!!!

-Q of S

Who are we going to blame for bad service?

Why the government, of course.

> What is unreasonable is the fact that
> people who schedule flight assignments
> don't seem to have the brainpower to account
> for time-on-shift.

Scheduling of this type is a mathematically unsolvable problem, and one of the hardest things known to man to develop heuristics for approximating. Throw in a few unexpected delays, a person sick, an hours-of-service violation and suddenly you have a cascade running through the schedule that is like an avalanche. But hey - don't take my word for it - sit down with Microsoft Access and code up a quick scheduling app in Visual Basic. Then have a scheduler from a local airline take a look at it ;-)

Temp service is an interesting idea but flight attendents must be certified per aircraft and per airline procedures manual. Maybe doable but very tough.

Guys - airlines might be over-regulated. If you want a discussion of that, get an appropriate expert to write an essay. But the majority of comments on here are from people who are clearly totally and utterly uninformed about the existing regulations, the reasons behind them, and what it takes to run a commercial airline safely.

Cranky

Most other major airlines have a different response to this problem. They tend to staff with more than the minimum number of flight attendants (and offer more service). Then, on those days when they are a few attendants short, they can still operate the flight (and just apologize for the service limitations). Since one flight attendant/50 seats seems reasonable to me (note that, in a real emergency, this works out to about 1/3 a flight attendant per emergency exit - which explains the exit row lectures people get). For the record, based on my previous experience, I should also note that ATA has a particularly dishonest reputation in delay situations so I'd take anything they said with a grain of salt.

There are also regulations about time-on/time-off for pilots. Are these also viewed as bureaucratic nonsense?

Re the difficulty of crew scheduling: the software that failed resulting in cancellation of all COMAIR flights for a day was a crew scheduling system.

Was it, by chance, a Microsoft product?

I was once on a long distance train that had to stop in the middle of nowhere for an hour becuase in-transit delays made the crew exceed the maximum hour rule, short of the nearest train station. The fresh crew drove to the stopped train and took over. We were all wondering what hapepns when the maximum hour rule rule requires the crew of an airplane to stop piloting before it reaches the dstination.

> Most other major airlines have a different
> response to this problem. They tend to staff with
> more than the minimum number of flight attendants
> (and offer more service). Then, on those days when
> they are a few attendants short, they can still
> operate the flight (and just apologize for the
> service limitations).

That very much depends if the location in question is a base or not. Having lived in small cities with service by mainline airlines where the city is NOT a base, I can tell you that if no extra crew happens to be living in that city the airline either cancels that flight or you wait for fresh crew to fly in on a competitor's flight.

> We were all wondering what hapepns when the
> maximum hour rule rule requires the crew of an
> airplane to stop piloting before it reaches
> the dstination.

There will be sufficient extra crew on board to allow statutory rest periods. Sometimes you will see them sleeping in a spare 1st class or business seat; the 777 can have either a bunk behind the pilot or a crew rest area above the passenger compartment (the Airbus 380 will have the crew rest compartment built into the wing; I think this will be the first plane since the B-36 to use the wing cavity as actual crew space).

Cranky

If there is a fire on board, you have 45 seconds to get the passengers off (the regulations require this, and it corresponds to actual experience, e.g. a 1989 fire in Salt Lake City during preboarding). Passengers cannot do this themselves unless they all happen to be ex-Marines. That's why you need flight attendants to marshal them. 45 seconds is a short time to deal with 50 passengers; if it takes an extra 15 seconds to deal with 67 passengers, that might leave 17 of them dead.

Cranky, I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not talking about spare flight attendants at a hub. I mean (by default) staffing a flight with an FAA reqirement of 4 flight attendants with 6. Now the 2 extra flight attendants don't sit around, they allow the airline to offer more in-flight service (beverages, meals, etc.), but that isn't essential if a flight needs to get out. As I recall, one of the cutbacks Delta is planning is to only exceed the FAA requirement my 1 or 2 flight attendants on some flights (instead of 2 or 3 as they used to). Either way, they'd still be in a better position with respect to crew scheduling than ATA.

> I mean (by default) staffing a flight with
> an FAA reqirement of 4 flight attendants with 6.

Yes, pre-deregulation airlines did things like that. Now the mainlines are competing with Southwest which uses its clout with Boeing to design versions of the 737 based on the number of flight attendents Southwest is willing to put on any given run. Hint: the number is always _lower_ than the mainlines.

Cranky

>And I'm somewhat shocked by the commenters who think that 1/50 is so much better than 1/67. These customers are, after all, adults.

By induction, 1 flight attendant can handle any finite number of customers. Awesome.

Doug, the COMAIR fiasco wasn't an MS product. It was something really old that could only handle 32,767 (2 to the 15th power, minus 1) schedule changes per month.

There was an MS failure that caused 800 planes to get grounded or rescheduled due to a known defect in the NT (current versions are called windows XP and windows 2003) operating systems. When the operating system has been running for 49 days, there is a counter that overflows. In this case, it cased programs (air traffic control) depending on that counter to fail.

Here is a link to a good explanation of the COMAIR issue:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=134005&cid=11185556

The issue was a 16-bit "signed" integer. Which means that 1 digit is the +/- sign, and the remaining 15 digits represent the number. When they had more than 32,767 changes in that month, the number went from being a large number to being a negative number. Then the smoke came out of the computer.

The MS failure:
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2275
http://tinyurl.com/5n9gc

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/30/1330230&tid=128

The second link takes you to a google search of Microsoft's own documentation for that defect.