Would You Stand on Short Flights if It Meant Cheaper Fares? | Hacker News Reader

Would You Stand on Short Flights if It Meant Cheaper Fares?

blogs.wsj.com

12 pointsFlemlord21 comments

No. With the holds at gates and taxi times, even if the scheduled flight time were 10 minutes, my experience is that flights usually have 1 hour of waste: taxiing, waiting in line to take off, waiting in a holding pattern to land, waiting for the previous flight at the arrival gate to leave.

How about passing out parachutes and jumping off at your stop?

I'm a bit leery of using the following for picking up passengers though ( but if not, perhaps a special suit with pants open at the derriere might help jettison excess cargo !8-)):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPUPOTczy7I&eurl=http%3A%...

How about passing out parachutes and jumping off at your stop?

This is an existing business model.

I might. I'd at least try it if given a substantial discount. Flying coach is already an uncomfortable experience. I wouldn't be surprised if short flights were actually more comfortable standing.

I thought that this seemed odd till I realized that it was RyanAir. Those guys will do anything to cut costs.

Those guys will do anything for publicity.

The limit on the number of people on a plane is the evacuation time, you can't fit many more people on without fitting more doors. Expect a statement later about how the bureaucrats wouldn't allow it.

I don't get why they'd even propose something like this. It'd be against commercial passenger air regulations in any reasonable country, because it's dangerous to let people stand up for the whole flight.

Every so often, people are either killed or end up wearing cervical collars due to turbulence.

It's dangerous to let people stand in a normally-equipped airliner. That doesn't mean there isn't some way to outfit one to safely hold standing passengers.

Agreed. During turbulence people get injured by flying objects. I dont want to get hit by flying bodies.

Yup. I consider Ryanair to be the most innovative airline in the world, and they have been for several years.

Most other carriers are content with copying the business models that have succeeded earlier or elsewhere. Ryanair gets up every day and tries to blow up the old ways of doing business.

Wal-Mart with wings.

I suspect that if RyanAir offers this they will nickel and dime those standing passengers for everything to recoup the lost ticket revenue. For example, in the standing configuration they effectively eliminate the overhead storage, that's one more bag passengers will have to check.

RyanAir already nickels and dimes passengers. How would this be different?

They said they polled 120K people on their website to gauge the sentiment for this idea. Isn't it true that polls that depend on self-selection are very biased? That obviously doesn't completely invalidate the idea, but isn't it a bit much to use it as supporting evidence?

The answer was an overwhelming 'yes' if the tickets were free. Two-thirds of respondents said they’d stand on flights of less than an hour if their tickets were free; 42% were willing to do so for tickets that were half-off.

In this case, who knows, it may be only that the hardcore, frequent fliers responded to the poll and that the majority of fliers actually hate the idea.

Given the trend in people packing less into smaller luggage, I wonder how feasible it would be to completely dispense with the overhead lockers and the cargo areas and have a bilevel plane, with slightly more room at the seats to stuff your things.

I've wondered why an airline doesn't try a "capsule hotel" style setup ever since I went to Japan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel

http://www.yesicanusechopsticks.com/capsule/

If you built a section of plane for it specifically, I bet you could fit as many people, and I'd love to be able to lay out and sleep. Maybe the engineering or safety wouldn't be possible, but if it was, I think it'd be fantastic.

There is a precedent for traveling like this and it's not very positive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Slavetrade2.jpg

That's great and is EXACTLY what I was going to say. I think the entire aircraft should be capusules or pods - smaller than the hotel ones - just big enough to turn over in. There would be room for your carry on, a screen in the ceiling for infotainment etc. Imagine how many could fit on the A380!

Given the number of people I've had the fortune to sit next to who believe flying is not a "shower-required" activity, hell no.

That is just completely out of the question. And I won't have people standing up next to me either.

It seems like the article neglects to define what a 'short flight' is.

Without stating how long you'd have to stand, any answer would be worthless.

Well, I don't think I've ever had a flight that was less than 30-40 minutes. So I think that most reasonable people could infer that a short flight less than 60-90 minutes

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