Terry Jones

I don’t understand why more people don’t go to conferences with a bag on wheels. I learned in 2000 that lugging a laptop in a shoulder bag around a busy conference for ten hours is extremely tiring. It was a Sony VAIO, weighing just over 1kg, so it wasn’t heavy itself. There’s also inevitable conference materials, t-shirt, cables, plug adaptors, maybe a sweater, external devices, reserve battery, notebook, spare business cards, stuff you don’t really want to leave in your hotel room (wallet, passport, keys), coins, phone(s), perhaps a novel, and all of a sudden you’ve got 6 kilos. Maybe more. I have a chronic back problem and I can’t deal with that much weight on one shoulder for a long time.

But with a wheeled bag you carry virtually zero weight. You don’t get tired. You have more capacity. You can carry a decent sized laptop. And if you want to buy a deeply discounted book (or 3) from the O’Reilly stand, you just do it.

I recently got a new wheeled bag. This is my first that allows you to rotate the handle. Instead of the handle being aligned perpendicular to your direction of travel, you can make it parallel. It’s surprising how much more comfortable this is. It follows the natural way your hand is aligned with your body, as though you were reaching out to shake someone’s hand. When you spend 10 hours a day at a conference, over 4 days, navigating airports, train stations and cavernous German convention halles, walking between hotel and conference or food, etc. etc., little things like that count.

I’m sitting in a hotel in Berlin, the Hotel Ibis Berlin Mitte. They’ve done a deal with Vodafone to provide wifi access for their guests.

Here’s the price list:

• 30 minutes – 5.95 euros, or $8.66
• 2 hours – 12.95 euros, or $18.85
• 24 hours – 29.95 euros, or $43.59

There’s no option to connect/disconnect and use your time bit by bit. You have to take it all at once, making the 24 hour option particularly attractive.

Way to go Vodafone! You idiots. With bargain basement rates like these I will certainly keep coming back. Same goes for you Ibis Hotel. Typical phone company strategy – maximally fuck your customers in the short term.

I wrote this at the airport in Barcelona waiting for a flight to Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin.

At check-in I wasn’t asked whether I had packed my bags myself of if I’d been with them constantly. It took about ten minutes total (including waiting in line) to get through security. The buzzer went when I went through the metal detector. The security guy didn’t send me back, he just frisked me quickly and thoroughly right there. No one asked me to take off my shoes or my belt. After checking in, no one asked me for my passport. Overall, extremely painless and with a minimum of nonsense.

I’ve left London a couple of times in the last month. Both times no one asked to see my passport until I was at the gate about to go down the tunnel to the plane. I was traveling without baggage and had printed my boarding cards at home. So the only person who looked at my passport was a regular Easyjet employee, who glanced at my face and the face in the passport and handed it back.

This is international travel in Western Europe today. It’s not always this easy, but it usually is.

Compare this to the pleasures of domestic US travel. Actually, I wont, but if you’ve done much US travel post-9/11 you’ll know what I’m referring to. Suffice to say I’m not looking forward to half a dozen US flights I have coming up.

Interestingly, between entering the plane and getting to my hotel in Berlin, I didn’t hear anyone speaking anything but German. Not a word of English or Spanish or anything else. There were probably 150 people on the plane, so it’s not as though I was alone.

I’ve flown in to the UK probably 30 times over the last 3 years. Here’s how
to cut a few corners:

1. It should go without saying – don’t check baggage unless you have to.
2. If you’re not checking baggage, print your boarding passes at home and
   go straight to the gate.
3. Take a seat at the very front of the plane.
4. Ask for and fill out a UK immigration form on the plane.
5. On Easyjet you can buy Gatwick or Stansted (etc) Express train tickets
   on the plane. It’s faster and 20% cheaper.
6. If arriving at Gatwick, take the stairs down to immigration –
   don’t folow the crowd walking down and around the gentle ramp – that’s
   about 4 times as long.
7. If arriving at Stansted, when you go down the escalator look under and
   behind the elevator as early as you can – the shuttle train may be there
   already. You may be able to run for it.
8. If arriving at Stansted, when you get on the shuttle train, position
   yourself in front of the crack between the doors on the far side of the
   train. That’s the side that will open when you arrive at immigration.
9. If arriving at Gatwick without bags, go up the escalator to the
   left to get to baggage. It’s slightly closer to where you’ll exit
   at the top.
10. If arriving at Gatwick, take the side lane “Arrivals from the European
    Union” out of the baggage area. It’s often empty.
11. If arriving at Gatwick, there’s a small train ticket desk on your right
    immediately when you get into the terminal. Even if you have a ticket,
    check their screen for the time your next train. You may need to run for it.

Perhaps the best suggestion is something I haven’t done yet – have an iris
scan that will let you skip the queues to enter the UK. I could have done
it today if I hadn’t been wandering aimlessly around the stores.

Continuing from the last post, let’s suppose fuel costs are constant across all airlines.

On my 6-hour Air Comet flight, I will be paying about $8/hr for fuel and $10/hr for everything else (not bad, seeing as I get to watch a couple of movies and eat a meal).

Going to Cheaptickets I see the next cheapest option is Air Lingus (not a direct route), who will charge me $450. So you’d be tempted to conclude that Air Lingus is 4 times more expensive than Air Comet. But… the price of the fuel is constant. That means I’m paying $400 for the trip in non-fuel costs, which would be roughly $65/hr if the flights were the same length (they’re not). So Air Lingus is actually more like 6.5 times as expensive as Air Comet. The cheapest US carrier (Delta in this case) will charge me $1,127 which would be more like $180/hr or 18 times as expensive as Air Comet (were the trips the same length, which they’re not).

All very non-scientific.

I’m about to book a cheap flight from JFK to Madrid with Air Comet. There are some alarming and amusing comments about the airline online. See this page for example – search for hot red smocks and slit skirts. I flew that route with them about a month ago and everything went smoothly.

And the low, low, price? Just 83 euros one way!

According to this site a 12-hour flight needs 110 tons of fuel. Mine’s a 6:15 flight, so call it 55 tons of fuel. A ton is 2000 pounds according to google, so 110,000 pounds of fuel are needed. Jet engine fuel is like kerosene and weighs about 6 pounds per gallon. So that’s 110,000 / 6 = 18,333 gallons of fuel for the trip. Fedex charges a fuel surcharge when the price of jet fuel rises above $0.98, so let’s assume Air Comet is paying $0.80 per gallon.

Thus the price of fuel alone for the trip is roughly 18,333 x $0.80 = $14,666.

The plane is an Airbus 313, which has a capacity of 295. If we assume the flight is full, Air Comet needs to charge each passenger just under $50 for fuel alone. 83 euros is about $110. So Air Comet can cover the cost of fuel. Good.

Continuing, that leaves $60 of my ticket price times 295 passengers, or roughly $17K to pay for everything else.

This all assumes that everyone is paying the same low price, which of course they are not.

While googling for the above numbers, I found an article about the first model plane that crossed the Atlantic. It weighed 11 pounds (5 kilos) and got about 3,000 miles per gallon of fuel, i.e., less than $1 of fuel for the whole trip.

Large passenger planes have two aisles. When leaving the plane, the right hand side always moves much faster than the left.

I think this happens because the door is on the front at the left and at the moment when the two lines meet the people coming from the right side have some momentum up, they’re going straight ahead, and they don’t need to turn a corner and merge to get off. The people from the left side have to inject themselves into this stream. Everyone is tired and maybe the people from the right are less inclined to politely let someone in from the left.

Whatever it is, the effect is pronounced. On some flights the right side will drain completely while there are still dozens of people left on the left. I’ve watched this many times. I’ve asked a couple of stewards, and they agreed but hadn’t noticed or didn’t know why.

Random thought for the week.