Flashes of Panic

It passes all understanding—well, mine, anyway—why we should be routed through both Minneapolis and Detroit en route from Austin to Hartford. There’s a perfectly good Minneapolis-to-Hartford flight leaving at about the same time we head to Detroit. We tried changing tickets, but they said (essentially) that the fare was tied to the route.

Now, it seems like if the Airline has committed to carry us from Austin to Hartford (or even, admitting that there’s probably a relatively small number of people making that particular trip on a given day, from Minneapolis to Hartford) that it would be less expensive for them to send us directly, rather than in two hops. Less expensive for them equals more profit. But apparently the pricing and scheduling of air travel has been sufficiently abstracted that it no longer reflects much reality; like packets in an IP network, once we’re in the system only our destination matters, and the route we take need only reflect the internal logic of the system, which is opaque to us.

Sometimes I find it intriguing to try and figure out why I get routed the way I do. Sometimes it just gives me headaches, like today when I’m dramatically short on sleep and tolerating a three-hour layover while still in Central time with two flights still remaining.

I wonder if an airline which operated by logical pricing, scheduling, and routing rules obvious to its passengers could be profitable? Or would it drown as the passengers invented Byzantine ways to game the system?