If/when "they" know more then "you"

I’ve mentioned this before but wanted to give you another example of just weirdness in giving out information.

I’m waiting for a friend who is flying in for a conference. I said I’d do the airport pick up. Got the flight information so I could check on status before I’d head out to the airport. 

About the time the flight is due in, for grins, I test the three places where the information is available for United Airlines flight 397.

First was the United web site. Behold:

Late, oh well.  Let’s check Flytecomm and see what is really going on. And, like so:

Yep, a few minor issues. First, note the take off times are different by 30 minutes and the flytecomm data is accurate to the minute. Finally, just to try to see what the humans think, I call United, ignoring the automated flight status stuff.  I get a human, apologize that I am on a rotary phone, and ask about flight 397.  About 20 minutes late? Right, thanks very much. What? No, I’m not really on a rotary phone, my doctor says pressing too many buttons on the phone inflames my hemorrhoids. [Okay, I made the last line up.]

Amazing, eh? How is it possible the core systems the humans have, can’t get accurate information.  There has to be some corporate wonk who decided that actual truth is somehow bad for the customers. Dumb.

Lesson for your start up: Just gives us the facts, we’ll figure it out.

Comments

[Zoli Erdos]

The United display is amazing in itself. According to their numbers a 26-minute delay at departure triples along the way, producing an 1hr 14 minutes late arrival :-)

[Brooks Moses]

(First, a formatting problem -- the two images are sitting side-by-side, so the second one gets wrapped out the edge of the screen on Opera. I've seen this before; it forces at least one thing in each line beside a right-justified image, even if there's no room for it.)

That said, I've found that the airline's departure times never agree with Flytecomm, for any airline (or for Yahoo's flight tracking), and the differences seem consistent with the hypothesis that Flytecomm is listing the time the wheels left the ground, whereas everyone else is listing the time the plane left the gate.

Though, in this case, that is a pretty large discrepancy just for that. And, of course, the arrival times (which are the crucial ones) are definitely just plain inaccurate!