If you decide to put out bad analysis, as UNITE HERE did last week regarding Lufthansa complaints, and someone calls you on it, what would you do? The smart answer would probably be to just let it go and stop calling attention to the work, especially since it has more holes than Swiss cheese. But fortunately for us, UNITE HERE has decided to go the opposite route.

The union is using one of oldest tricks in the book: going after my credibility to muddy the water. This is just dumb. They really shouldn’t want to bring more attention to a flawed report like this. Now I’ve just dug in deeper and found even more problems with it. While I was waffling before, now I’m not. UNITE HERE has truly earned the Cranky Jackass Award.

You can read the union’s entire response here (pdf) if you’d like, but I’ll pull out the most fun parts. Let’s start with the opening.

One of the things I appreciate about your site is you are very open about your relationship to companies in the airline industry. And just one month after Lufthansa gave you a free round-trip, business class ride on its A380 from San Francisco to Frankfurt, perhaps I should not be surprised at your dismissive response to my report.

Ah yes, the back-handed compliment. A time-honored tradition that’s used to cover bad work. If someone calls out real issues, just call his or her credibility into question but look completely pleasant while doing so. This takes the focus off your bad analysis and tries to shift the issue. (Sounds like the author may have a future in politics.) It’s true, I’m very open about these things, and I did just fly Lufthansa at the airline’s expense. That doesn’t mean I won’t gladly rip Lufthansa a new one if it’s deserved. The problem here for the union is that it’s not.

You can read the rest of the response yourself if you’re interested in more sugar-coated insults, but let’s focus on the weak defense of the report itself and break that down.

The Department of Transportation data in the report is real, and to my knowledge is the only reliable U.S. source of compiled complaint information on international
airlines. If the DOT is willing to use these numbers to “to determine the extent to which carriers are in compliance with federal aviation consumer protection regulations,” then they’re good enough for me. Even if I am just a research analyst at a union.

*sigh* The issue is not whether this is the only place to get complaint data or not but whether or not it’s statistically valid and can be used to explain a trend or not. In this case, the year-over-year change in complaints from 2009 to 2010 moved by roughly less than one-thousandth of one percent over total passengers carried by Lufthansa to and from the US (using my rough passenger estimate). Even the initial number itself is so tiny that it’s not significantly different from zero. So regardless of what the purpose of the complaint reports are in the eyes of the DOT, that doesn’t magically mean that we can consider each number valid for any kind of analysis.

You’re right, I could have used the raw numbers, but I sort of agree with you that the raw numbers themselves aren’t incredibly exciting on their own. They’re small
because, well, how many people actually go through the effort to submit their airline complaints to the U.S. government? (If you care about an answer, you can look at the DOT analysis for the new passenger rights rule, where the DOT uses the ratio that every 1 complaint submitted to the DOT represents about 61 complaints submitted to the foreign airlines.

Excellent. Let’s just forget about using raw numbers because they aren’t “exciting.” I see. So we’re not looking for statistical validity here. We’re looking for excitement. You can apply any ratio you want to these numbers, but that still doesn’t make the small change valid. And this ratio is just an estimate by the DOT anyway, so using it would make a statistically insignificant change even less valid, if that’s possible.

The result of that comparison was clear. Lufthansa complaints went up, Air France and British Airways complaints went down. Is the sample number of complaints
small? Yes. But if the increases were random, would Lufthansa have seen them in 7 out of 8 top categories from 2009 to 2010? If they were random, wouldn’t Air France and British Airways have seen more fluctuation too?

This is my favorite part. I hadn’t even touched the Air France and British Airways numbers in my initial post, so I should thank the union for giving me even more firepower to show how awful the analysis is. The result is far from “clear” as proposed.

When I spoke with the research analyst, he told me that he didn’t bother looking at the monthly complaint reports. He just looked at the year-end summary and called it a day. That makes the analysis even worse because it doesn’t look for outliers. And that’s exactly why BA’s numbers are so different. In 2009, BA saw 347 complaints while dropping to a mere 120 in 2010. That’s great improvement, right? Wrong.

A look at the monthly data shows that in October 2009, BA received an incredible 244 complaints for reservations/ticketing/boarding. Why? According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “The increase in the number of October complaints is attributed primarily to British Airways’ erroneous offer of $40 fares between the United States and India.” That’s an outlier and can’t be used to judge overall performance for an entire year. Guess what happens if we just substitute a more typical monthly result that month? We see an increase in complaints year-over-year approaching 20 percent. Fun with numbers, right? (Not that this is a significant change either.)

I highly recommend reading the entire response. In particular, I like the union’s effort to call into question the safety of the engines on the A380. Enjoy.

This is just way too cool. A reader who asked to be identified as Johosofat had a project in his high school ceramics class to make a slab relief of a mythical creature. He chose the Cranky Jackass. . . .

How awesome is that?! I almost gave the award to the union in yesterday’s post, but I think I really need to keep it for something special. After all, it’s now been elevated in stature with this rendering. Let’s see who does something deserving next.

Thanks, Johosofat!

Earlier this week, American decided to stop offering free same day standby to customers who aren’t elite members in the AAdvantage program. While I’m sure some are steaming over the move, I’m not. It actually makes sense to me. I’m just pissed that they’ve decided to treat their customers like two year olds with their incredibly stupid spin. And for that, they get the not-so-coveted Cranky Jackass award.

The press release announcing the change was entitled, “American Airlines Streamlines its Airport Processes.” Usually a vague message like that means they threw a bunch of stuff into one release, hiding the bad news at the bottom. I think that’s what they teach in the College of Spin. If there was such a place, it would undoubtedly be located in a beautiful mountainous environment with grand vistas of panoramic wintry wonders (Siberia). But that’s not what happened here.

The entire release was focused solely on the fact that you can no longer standby for earlier flights on the day of travel unless you’re an elite member. You now have to pay $50 for a confirmed seat, if it’s available. Taking away this option does, in fact, “streamline” airport processes, but does the customer care about that? No. They care about the changing benefits, and they’re not going to be fooled by that headline. Gimme a friggin’ break. Do I look that stupid to you?

Wait, don’t answer that. That wasn’t one of my finer moments.

But here’s the point. I completely understand why you’re doing this. I’m sure too many people were taking advantage of the same day standby option to avoid paying higher fares. Sure, you book the 6p flight and standby for the early morning flight. Or you book the redeye and fly during the day. That’s money out of your pocket and into the pocket of the consumer. I may not like it, as a non-elite flier, but I get it.

So don’t feed me a line of crap about how American is doing this “as part of its efforts to streamline processes and the customer experience during flight departure. . . . ” Clearly that’s a benefit to you as well, but I don’t care what the benefit is to you. I care what the impact is for me. Please stop treating me like a child and tell me why you’re doing this. I want to see this headline:

“American Airlines Starts Charging for Same Day Standby Because You Bastards Won’t Pay Enough for a Ticket”

Now that would be refreshing.

You might have seen the Cardinal’s guest post here on Cranky a couple weeks ago on the Association of European Airlines’ (AEA) efforts to protect its member airlines despite there being little to no apparent public benefit. Well, apparently the AEA reads blogs, has no problem commenting on them, but has so little respect for them that they can’t be bothered to explain their position. And for that, they have earned a Cranky Jackass award.

The Cardinal’s post was prompted by the AEA’s efforts to lobby the EU to get more access to credit for its member airlines to renew their fleets. The problem here, of course, is that if the airlines are too weak to have access to credit on their own, then they should simply have to wait to renew their fleets until they can afford it. He also criticized the AEA’s support of suspending slot rules at constrained airports so that legacy carriers could sit on their slots even if they weren’t using them. These are just a couple examples of the longstanding pattern for Europeans to want to prop up their failing carriers. Yes, I’m looking at you, Alitalia.

Apparently, the AEA didn’t like this post and they made that clear in a comment on the blog. Unfortunately, they also feel they’re so superior that they can’t be bothered to explain their position. I’m republishing their comment here:

Here in the AEA offices we fell off our seats laughing. EU institutions give preferential treatment to the AEA carriers? We wish. I’m afraid your correspondent’s insights into the European scene don’t go very deep.

We could explain, in nice easy-to-understand terms, why schedule continuity and predictability across successive timetable seasons is a Good Thing, but we can’t be bothered. If The Cardinal can’t work that out for himself, there’s not much point.

Anyway, thanks for the publicity. It’s nice to know that someone on the other side of the world has such a high opinion of our lobbying prowess. Keep believing.

It’s that second paragraph that gets me. I don’t think anyone would argue that schedule continuity and predictability are welcomed by travelers, but if legacy airlines can’t maintain that schedule continuity by actually operating their flights, then it seems quite clear to me that other carriers should be given the opportunity to use those slots if they have better uses for them.

Of course, the AEA doesn’t think it’s even worth explaining this to my readers, and for that, they should be ashamed. Do you think that blog readers are so stupid that they aren’t worth your time? You are sadly mistaken, if that’s the case, and it makes you look as out of touch as your efforts would imply. Yes, AEA, that is why you have earned the Cranky Jackass award.

I asked the Cardinal if he would like to comment, and sure enough, he did.

So AEA didn’t lobby for slot waivers and when the EU none-the-less offered them to the AEA (out of the goodness of its heart) the AEA didn’t actually accept the waivers?”

As we said, the EU has, in general, done a good job of being even-handed between LCCs and the AEA, but this is one instance in which they clearly erred on the side of the AEA. There are rules, the rules shouldn’t be waived just because AEA carriers haven’t done as good a job of keeping their financial noses clean as Ryanair, EasyJet, et al.

Amen. Maybe the AEA will actually be willing to respond to this one. If so, AEA, I’ve got a guest post with your name on it. Disagreements are always welcome here, but refusing to even enter the conversation makes you seem elitist and out of touch. Care to change that perception?

There was some disturbing news out of the Metroplex last week when American’s pilots announced that the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP) is dead. It would seem that this program contributed greatly to improving safety at the airline, and now, thanks to bickering and stubbornness, it’s gone, and that’s why we’ve got a big fat Cranky Jackass award to be shared by both sides in the fight.

The idea behind ASAP is that it gave pilots a forum for reporting safety issues without fear of landing in hot water. This helped expose safety issues that occurred so that they wouldn’t happen again. It seems that this was a good medium for bringing safety issues to the surface.

Now, it appears that the pilots and American management can’t come to an agreement on how to continue the program, so it’s dead. Way to go. All we can do now is throw out a bunch of blame-bombs to both sides.

From what I can tell, the pilots wanted to have stronger immunity provisions for pilots who report, and American management didn’t like that. In fact, management wanted to have less so that they could take action against pilots who did report reckless behavior. (Would someone really report reckless behavior?) Without a doubt, both of these groups can shoulder the blame to some extent. And it’s naive to think that politics didn’t play a part here.

The pilots and management aren’t exactly holding hands and singing Kumbaya these days. But now everyone is worse off, including passengers. Safety violations will likely go unreported, or at the very least, reported through alternate, less direct channels. That is unfortunate, to say the least, and it shows just how bad labor relations are right now. The fact that the two sides cannot come together for a program that was good for everyone is just downright sad, and it certainly makes me cranky. You’ve both truly earned this Cranky Jackass award.