Fast But Fragile

The sheer poor design of the international air travel system had never really occurred to me before. Previously, I've been subject to all sorts of misadventures in air travel but they have mostly been minor or at least seemed isolated; I've had mostly good travel experiences in my life and I've traveled a reasonable amount because of my time at IBM. But an unbelievable number of things have gone wrong with my flights so far on this trip and it has set me thinking about air travel/airports as a whole.

Don't get me wrong though. Nothing seriously bad has happened and I am very thankful for that; there are many, far worse things that could have happened. When nothing is going wrong within the system and nothing external is putting pressure on the system it works very well. It is a miraculous construct to have at my disposal and I appreciate living in an age in which I can decide to fly the other side of the globe and be there in less than 48 hours (again, in the best case).

That being said, there are so many failure modes in the system with the manifestations of those failures varying from impacting only a single user to impacting the integrity of the entire system. In the most extreme cases, the system will cease to function entirely. There is a lot of redundancy built in to the system at certain levels but there doesn't appear to be any redundancy at others - although I fully admit that part of the issue may be ignorance on my part and not an actual problem with the system. Without exploring it more I can't be sure about some of the types of failures I'm thinking of but there are definitely failure modes that are poorly handled or not handled at all; I have little doubt of this because I have experienced many of them first-hand and heard stories of or observed others second-hand.

Let Me Count The Ways

At a very high level, the failure modes I'm thinking of fit into one of these categories (each of which has myriad causes):

• Airports shutting down
• Airplanes having mechanical problems
• Staffing problems (pilots, gate agents, et al.)
• Luggage routing errors
• Passenger routing errors

And my flight is about to leave so I have to stop there for now. Something to think more about later.