Airlines: Welcome to the Digital Age!

Airlines: Welcome to the Digital Age!

Despite the incredibly complicated new technology being invented in our age, the airplane still remains one of the most impressive inventions. What is more dumbfounding than a 100,000 pounds of metal launching into the air and then moving as fast as the speed of sound to land in another country in less than a day? The machines behind the entire process of air travel are fantastic, so why is the process to board airplanes so mundane?

Well, maybe it doesn’t have to be.  Last week, a Canadian man claimed that he was able to enter the United States with a copy of his passport on his iPad. The article said that after security carefully inspected the digital document, Martin Reisch was ushered through border control.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection later denounced the story as false. They clarified that “scanned images” are not an adequate form of identification. Security gave Reisch leave to enter the U.S. because he also presented his driver’s license and birth certificate.

However, this incident has clearly planted an idea in the minds of technology innovators. What if identification were digital? Today, 35% of adults in the U.S. own a smartphone and most of them are rarely seen without them, especially while traveling. The next time you walk through an airport, or are waiting at a gate, count the number of people around you with their faces buried in their iPhones or blackberries. You will surely count a multitude of people, whether you find that discovery surprising or not. Imagine if all you had to do to confirm your identity, whether to airport security or a police officer, is whip out your phone and show an image or a barcode.

Though we haven’t yet reached the age of digital ID, airlines are already taking advances to make checking-in and boarding easier and more reliant on technology. In 1995 Continental Airlines unveiled kiosks: the little machines with touch screens where people can check-in and receive their boarding passes without assistance. Kiosks are now old news, as is the online check-in initiated by Alaska Airlines in 1999. 80 percent of travelers use these options.

The new technological trend for check-in is electronic boarding passes, eboarding. Though it has been five years since Continental began experimenting with this technology, today it is still not widely used, partly because not many people have heard of it.

I used my first eboarding ticket over the summer, on a flight to Chicago, and found that it made the whole process of check-in much easier. An eboarding pass is simply your plane ticket sent to you via email or text (an option you must chose either when booking your flight or using an airline application already downloaded to your phone). You can then open the ticket on your phone and present it to airport staff for scanning.

The ticket consists of your flight’s information and an image of a bar code. However, it is not a typical barcode. I was confused, afraid my phone was malfunctioning, when I opened the email to find an image of what looked like the snow that appears on a television that has lost its signal. Apparently, the barcodes of eboarding passes are 2D as opposed to 1D. 1D barcodes are what most people expect to see, a series of vertical lines varying in width. Eboarding passes use 2D barcodes because they are easier to send via the web. As an added bonus, 2D barcodes offer greater protection than their 1D counterparts because they are encrypted and much tougher to copy.

Another proof of eboarding passes’ superiority to regular paper tickets is that, with eboarding, you simply present your phone and ID to security and the gate attendant to be admitted to your flight. No more messing around with paper tickets that transform into wrinkled balls or fly away from you and get lost. Also, no more standing in absurdly long check-in lines to get your ticket. You already have it! Of course if you have baggage that needs to be checked, that’s a different story. Finally, the icing on the cake for all those environmentalists out there, eboarding passes are eco-friendly!

While eboarding passes have many advantages, the technology is still developing and the tickets sometimes pose quite a few problems. For one, if your phone’s battery dies, you are essentially screwed. At least in the sense that you have to then check-in regularly, which will further delay your trip. Also, sometimes the scanners have trouble reading the passes or the officers and attendants get flustered and annoyed with the unfamiliar technology. However, the biggest drawback is that for parties of more than one person, the eboarding pass is not very efficient. Unless, each person has the boarding pass handy on their separate phones, it wastes time to handle multiple passes on one device.

Luckily, technology is ever changing and improving. The time will come when only machines run check-in or when airplanes become obsolete in light of even faster modes of transportation. However, for now let us look hopefully to a future of digital IDs and digital ticketing and take advantage of the new technology as it emerges.

Flying Germs!

Flying Germs!

I have some bad news and some worse news. The bad news is that the holidays are over. No more merriment, just time to get back to work in the New Year. The worse news? You could soon become sick, if you are not already. But, your upset stomach may not be the result of gorging on holiday candy, and your fever probably is not a symptom of your depression that the joy of the season has passed. If you want a scapegoat for your coughing and sneezing, blame the airplanes.

As countless families crowded the airports this year with their grimy suitcases and running noses, the risk for disease infection while traveling by air increased 20%. Germs are everywhere, so skipping a flight to maintain your health is flawed logic. But, the facts show that the risk of infection in airports is relatively high.

First there is security. Travelers jostle the unmoving lines, hoping to get through quickly, but all they accomplish is creating a dense crowd of germ-infested people. Once a lone traveler breaks free of the oppressive mas, her peril is not averted. Taking off her shoes, her bare feet must rest on a floor crawling with other people’s bacteria, while her own microscopic bugs are added to the writhing mix. Additionally, the buckets containing her shoes and belongings probably haven’t been cleaned recently. After passing through the scanner, she grabs her belongings from the plastic bins and shoves on her shoes, buckles her belt, and wraps herself in her jacket, all of which have had ample amount of time to soak up hundreds of more germs.

Realizing the danger of unsanitary airports, airline officials have asked researchers to find the areas where prevention needs to be targeted. Airports themselves lack sufficient resources to conduct these studies themselves. Already, a National Academy of Sciences panel is six months into a two-year study that is taking samples of specific airport areas to try to pinpoint opportunities for infection. Besides security, the other possible culprit areas are check-in kiosks and baggage claim.

But exposure to germs doesn’t end after boarding the plane. Far from it! Packing 180 people into a long cylinder container is not at all conducive to one’s good health. High-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters can capture 99.97% of bacterial and virus-carrying particles…while the filter is working. During those times when the air filters are turned off (boarding, exiting, for long waits on the ground just to save energy), germs can spread like wildfire. Viruses thrive in low-humidity environments, a perfect description for the air on planes. In these conditions, mucus membranes dry out and the body is less effective at preventing infection.

Yet, the horribly sterile smell that permeates the air on all planes is actually your barrier between infection and disease. In 1979 a study was conducted in which passengers sat on a plane for 3 hours with the engines turned off and no air circulation. 72% of those 54 people got sick within two days of the test. Their flu strain was traced to a single passenger. As a direct result of the study, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an advisory in 2003 saying that passengers should be removed from the plane within 30 minutes if there is no air circulation. However, this policy is not mandatory, along with many other seemingly important FAA regulations. So beware the air!

And beware those passengers seated 2 seats behind, in front of, and on either side of you. A study from the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, proved this two-seat radius to be the “hot zone” for exposure to disease. Not only is air a problem, but also every surface you touch. Tray-tables, seat pockets, pillows, and blankets all can carry unique diseases that, if obtained, make for a not so pleasant welcome home after the holidays.

However the growth of germs in those areas is rather obvious. People recount stories of a mother changing her child’s diaper on her open tray table or a child sticking his slimy boogers under the tray. Passengers have shuttered as their hands touch the soft remains of a used tissue or squishy old French fry stuffed in the seat pocket. All these instances are indeed gross and don’t help the spread of disease, but taking precautionary measures, infection can be easily avoided. Hydrate, wash, and disinfect: three simple ways to fend off evil viruses. In more explicit terms drink lots of water, wash your hands frequently (embrace the virtues of hand sanitizer), and disinfect your tray table with disinfecting wipes.

Whatever the risk, hypochondria is a poor reason to stop traveling by air. If you don’t believe me, ask a true scientist. Mark Gendreau of Boston’s Lahey Clinic Medical Center and his teammates published a paper in 2005 concluding that passenger’s perceived risk of infection is generally higher than the actual risk. “If you take the proper precautions, you should do quite well,” Dr. Gendreau explained. “In most of us, our immune system does what it was designed to do—protect us from infectious insults.”

Your complaints about unsanitary conditions on planes, while sometimes well founded, are more often then not an expression of fear not of reality. While the crowded flying conditions only serve to increase the growth of bacteria, airport and airline staff members try to keep areas sanitary (though they don’t usually put in their best effort). If anyone is to blame for your contraction of a mysterious sickness, it is your unsanitary fellow passengers and your own careless habits.

By Land or By Air?

By Land or By Air?

It’s right before the holiday season and everyone is caught up in travels to bring the family together. But, before everyone can cozy up around a fire with warm mugs of hot chocolate, the details of the trips have to be planned and those many miles have to be traversed. But what is the best way to do so: car, train or plane? To solve this problem, I isolated three different trips, one short (from DC to New York City), one medium (from DC to Chicago), and one long (from DC to Los Angles). After examining each journey, I found that the one I expected to be the correct answer for each trip was shockingly incorrect.

Considering speed, I found that for all of these journeys, including from DC to NYC, the plane is actually the best option. Many travelers would strike the plane out when traveling short distances because they believe the time spent driving to and from the airport, passing through security, and waiting at the gate makes the overall commute much longer than a drive. Yet, the facts show that air travel, even when adding an extra three hours to the actual plane ride, is quicker than a car ride; Compare about 3 hours and 30 minutes to 4 hours. I am not even factoring in the unavoidable holiday traffic, which can make car trips twice as long. Trains, due to the recommended 60 mile per hour speed limit set by the federal railroad administration, travel slower than cars, whose drivers rarely obey the limits. However, there is no traffic on a railway. Compared to a drive through holiday traffic, a train ride can be significantly quicker. For medium and long trips, the plane is quicker without question, deducting anywhere from 6 hours to a whole day off the journey. Yet, if scheduled correctly, the train trip can sometimes be the most efficient. If one takes an overnight train from DC to Chicago spending 8 hours sleeping, then the 11 hour journey becomes a mere 3 hours of active time. To travel by air the trip takes about four hours. Finally, even if a car can get you to your destination fastest, the time spent is wasted because you are forced to pay attention to the road, while on planes and trains you can read, study, work, or sleep.

Probably the most important factor in travel mode is cost. It does cost more to fly to New York than to drive there, but the approximately 19 dollar difference is less than one would imagine. Also, I’ve only taken into account the cost of fuel for the car ride. If you plan to get snacks along the way, a luxury that is provided complimentary in flights, the cost of driving could overtake the cost of a plane ride for even short distances. As for trains, short distances are pretty expensive, more so than a flight; from DC to NYC the cost of a train ticket is about 118 dollars. However, from DC to Chicago, the price of a ticket is 10 dollars less than an airplane ticket. The gas used in a drive up to Chicago costs about 130 dollars but because the person will have to eat multiple times during that 9 hour or more journey, the overall cost could raise to be the same as the cost of the 200 dollar plane or train ticket. Once you begin to consider distances larger than the 600 miles from DC to Chicago, buying a plane or train ticket becomes progressively cheaper than driving to your destination. Lastly, one must consider competition. There are many airlines in the US and all of them compete to get passengers to purchase their tickets. On the other hand, Amtrak is the only train service that reaches destination all across the US. Amtrak thus has a sort of monopoly in the railway transportation industry and so has a more limited supply of trips and sells tickets at higher prices. Overall, the most cost efficient way to travel depends on the distance of the journey, but flying is a cheaper option than most people would expect.

If you have to pay to travel somewhere, you would hope that the journey would be safe and comfortable. Comfort is really a matter of opinion. Many travelers despise airplanes with their small seats, upright backs, and minimal leg room, but I would choose to ride on a plane where I can walk around, read, study, or sleep than to drive in a car where I can’t move for hours. However, whether you want more space or time to be active, a train is the most comfortable option. Passengers are always able to walk around (no takeoff and landing policies) and some trains offer sleeping cabins with beds. Trains are also the safest way to travel. Not so surprisingly, planes are the second safest mode of transportation with a fatality rate of 2.3 billion passenger miles (a passenger mile is equivalent to one passenger transported one mile). The fatality rate for cars, in contrast, is 7.2 billion passenger miles. I find it odd that, in light of these statistics, so many people are afraid of flying but willingly hop is cars everyday. 40,0000 people die in driving accidents every year, whereas some years there are no fatalities in plane crashes. People are probably irrationally afraid of planes because the likelihood of passengers surviving a plane crash is far less than the likelihood of passengers surviving a car accident. However, the chance of a plane crashing is far less than a car crashing, especially as roads become clogged with holiday traffic and road rage ensues.

Generally, people are right to take the car for short journeys and a plane or train for longer trips. But, during the holiday season, when traffic fills up almost every major roadway, flying seems to be the fastest, most cost efficient, and safest option for any distance of travel. I would advise anyone who has not yet made their holiday travel plans to schedule a plane trip; you will probably be in a much more festive mood than if you take a car!