There's a lot of bad information circulating on the famous United/Republic "passenger drag" so I wanted to consolidate a 2nd post with some of them.

Myth: This was an oversold flight

It turns out the flight was probably not oversold. A UA spokesman said it wasn't. It was a fully sold flight, but a sudden need arose to move 4 flight attendants to SDF (Louisville) and they arrived at the gate after the flight had boarded. In United's contract of carriage, it defines an oversold flight as a flight where there are more passengers with confirmed reservations checked in by the check-in deadline than they have seats on the plane. That does not appear to be the case on this flight, but Republic and UA got confused about it.

That, in turn, means Republic did not have the right to invoke the clauses of the contract for oversold flights. If so, they are just plain in the wrong, and this becomes a case with far less interesting nuance. United has changed their tune (of course due to public pressure) and are going full mea culpa.

Airline reservation computers oversell all the time, and carefully calculate exactly how much to oversell. It looks like the algorithms decided to not oversell this flight. And they were right -- when they called for volunteers, nobody accepted, even at a very high price ($800 to $1,000) for a flight where most tickets are under $200. The algorithms performed perfectly.

Myth: This was United Airlines

Technically it was Republic Airline, a small regional airline dba "United Express." However, United sells and and manages the tickets and they use the brand, and it's under United's contract, so United certainly gets a lot of the responsibility. And I am impressed that UA has not tried to throw Republic under the bus here.

Republic Airways actually operates lots of regional flights for United, AA and Delta, so this could have probably happened to any of them. I don't know if they have a lot of airline specific training on bumping procedure for their teams. United may have just gotten some very bad luck of the draw here -- and then made it worse by defending it at first. And it may be that the bumping policies UA gives to Republic might have made this more likely than the ones Delta and AA give it, but I don't think they are tremendously different. Some hinges on whether the flight crew was a Republic crew, or a United crew.

But still, though it was not United, the buck stops with United, and at least now, they are not resisting that at all.

Myth: On an oversold flight, they can pull passengers off the plane.

If this had been an oversold flight, their contract still does not let them remove passengers from the plane involuntarily. It says they can "deny boarding." Deny boarding does not mean remove -- there is another section of the contract on removal. More bad news for United/Republic, but again, it makes the case less interesting as it's an example of something you sort of expect -- junior employees of a regional affiliate not being properly trained on what to do in an unusual situation and thus screwing up. That happens in 100 different ways all the time, but each particular incident is rare and probably does not indicate a systemic problem. That's good -- but it is only systemic problems that are of interest to the public, and which would make you boycott a company. If the junior employees make mistakes like this too often, then you have a systemic problem to worry about. (United does not have a good reputation on this count, of course.)

Update: These flight attendants were "must ride" passengers

New information reveals the flight crew declared themselves "must ride." I don't have a lot of details, but this is a special designation in the law (not the UA contract) which declares the crew are needed somewhere to avoid cancellation of a flight. Once a passenger is declared "must ride" the plane is required, reports say, to do everything possible to get that passenger to their destination, including delaying the plane and apparent, yes, even involuntary bumping. I am waiting for more information on this status, which would invalidate partly what I say above. They can't pull you for an oversell, but they may be able to pull you for a must-ride. The law is there to keep the aviation system humming. Once flight crews don't get to flights, it can mean disruption to more than just that flight.

Myth: If the doctor had just handed one of the police officers a Pepsi, it all would have been defused.

No, but that's the best joke on this that I've seen.

Myth: It's overselling that's the problem

With the mistaken impression that overselling was the cause here, a lot of people are stating overselling is evil, and Chris Christie has even called to prohibit it. That's a big mistake. Overselling is very good for airlines and the flying public. I explained that in yesterday's post but I will go into more details below. You want an airline that does at least some overselling, though one can debate how much you want.

Myth: The airline prioritized employees over paying customers

In this situation, it needed to move those employees to crew a flight first thing out of SDF. If they had not gotten a crew there, that flight gets cancelled. Roughly 70 paying passengers get stranded against their will. While clearly nobody wants to be stranded against their will, the hard truth is you want to fly an airline that will strand (with good compensation) 4 people to avoid doing it to 70. (Here I am talking about the normal approach, which is to deny boarding to 4 people, not to try do drag people off the plane.) Still, I have to view it as prioritizing 70 passengers over 4, not employees over passengers.

Maybe: They could have driven the flight attendants there or chartered a jet

This is possibly true but possibly not. First of all, these airlines are all about procedure. They don't authorize junior employees to be innovative or authorize them to spend money. So chances are if somebody thought of that, they had no system with which to do it. That is a fault of the airline but the sad norm of corporate bureaucracy.

Secondly, while I don't know this to be true, all flight crew operate under a set of complex rules about required rest. You don't want a sleepy pilot landing your plane, or a sleepy flight attendant helping people get onto the evacuation slides. These rules are very hard and fast. I suspect trying to sleep in a car doesn't count, and an overnight ground ride is out of the question. Had they acted very quickly, and had a system in place, they could have probably gotten the crew there a bit after 11 -- not long after the flight actually landed due to the chaos -- so that might have worked, in hindsight.

They could have offered the passengers a limo ride, but again probably had no way to do something that out of the ordinary.

The same applies to an air charter. Getting an air charter on short notice is difficult, but they could have gotten one for the flight crew (or another flight crew) in the early morning if they had a system in place. This is very expensive of course, and so not likely to be in their playbook.

Maybe: They should never have gotten to the point where it was so urgent to get that flight crew moved

Airlines move flight crews a lot. There are airline pilots who live on one coast and mostly work on the other, commuting by "deadheading" on one of their airlines planes.

When you design a system that needs various parts -- planes and flight crew -- you have to "overprovision," which is to say leave some wiggle room. That means you have some number of planes, crews and other resources sitting idle or on call, and you use them when something else fails. Everybody does it because you don't want to run so close to the wire all the time. If you do, the slightest problem causes a cascade of cancellations. Airlines have to worry not just about small problems but even big ones like storms that cancel or delay many flights.

It's not practical, however, to overprovision to the point that you never fail. You can do it, but it's really expensive. You have to waste a lot of money, and you don't have a competitive company. So every systems designer tries to figure out how to overprovision just the right amount. An amount that will have a few failures, but not too many. On top of that, you try to plan so you handle those failures with the least amount of pain, but you accept they will still happen.

What that means -- and I don't have any specific facts about this flight -- is that sometimes you will be skating the edge, and sometimes you will fail. Sometimes you will find that crew are not going to make a flight unless you do something a little extra.

The bumping law, I think, is where the airlines find their "extra." They don't want to bump paying customers -- it's expensive and hurts customer relations. But they don't want to cancel flights even more. So every so often, every airline has to find a solution. The bumping law offers them that solution. They can legally deny boarding to paying passengers against their will to make room for crew. This is much more workable, and under their control, than other options like using charter jets, or if distances are short, ground service.

True, but: Just about anything would be cheaper than the hit they've taken

That's true -- but only in hindsight. No playbook for these situations is going to say, "If you have to, spend $10,000 rather than bumping passengers just in case it turns into the PR nightmare of the year." By definition, nobody knew that would happen.

In reality, airlines involuntarily bump 50,000 pax per year and while they grumble, this is the first time it's ever gone done like this, with eviction from the plane, blood, camera phones and Facebook. So I don't blame them for not seeing this could happen. I do blame them, however, for not understanding that any time you bring the police into a situation you bump the risk of something bad happening.

True, but: They should have known this would happen once they called the goons.

They should have known, but I can suspect why they didn't -- because they actually do this all the time and don't have PR problems. Flight crews face unruly passengers reasonably often. They have training for it and procedures. And those procedures do call for getting the police, even knowing how that can go south. What those plans obviously did not account for was doing this when it was completely clear the passenger was the victim, that they only removed him because they wanted his seat. The rules for removing passengers mostly deal with safety issues. When they declare a passenger a safety risk, and the passenger makes trouble and even (rarely) causes a scuffle they are protected if the passenger was really a safety risk, or they can even come up with a credible lie why they thought he was a safety risk. No such story is possible here. Sure, the law says anybody who refuses a flight crew order can be removed from the plane. Technically it says this. In reality, it's insane to think you can remove somebody for refusing the order "leave the plane" when the order is not given for a valid reason. The law says obey, but every sense of justice goes the other way. In fact, more than that, I don't think a court would convict somebody for refusing that order, even if they are guilty, because society does not intend to grant the airlines that sort of power.

Put another way, three things are true:

1. They can't order you off the plane just to take your seat (but they didn't know that.) We don't want airlines to have that power.
2. Once somebody refuses a flight crew order, you can then order them off the plane.

As such, it's clear that "we removed him because he disobeyed our order to leave" is a loophole that would never stand up to scrutiny.

Myth: I should worry this can happen to me.

Well, I have to concede this is true -- part of this did happen to me! The first flight I took with Kathryn, the airline came up to us after we had boarded, and insisted she give up her seat for a deadheading pilot. The pilot never sat there -- instead he went up to use the jumpseat in the cockpit. We were quite angry, especially when her later flight lost an engine in the middle of the Pacific.

But a lot had to go wrong for this to happen. Here's my guess as to the list of things that went wrong:

• Something failed in the planned movement of flight crew, and they needed to get a crew to SDF for a Monday Morning flight. They looked over their options, and decided to try to get on UA3411
• They decided that very late, so the flight had already boarded full when the flight crew came to the gate and said they needed to be on that plane. (I don't know why they selected this one over the next, I presume both were full, or the next one might even have been oversold. You want to avoid the last flight in any event.)
• They tried the normal approach -- offer an incentive for volunteers. They got to $800. (UA says $1,000.) It failed. Nobody bit. This is a flight where everybody needed to get to SDF.
• They didn't know their contract well, and decided they could do involuntary bump to solve their problem. Why not, it's what they usually do, right? They got mean, declaring the plane would not fly until 4 got off.
• They really didn't know their contract well, and figured they could involuntary bump by removing passengers from the plane. They can't, but they told people they had to leave.
• Usually that works. In fact, I suspect it's worked pretty much every time for decades. Not this time. One man refuses to leave. Now they had a passenger refusing flight crew orders.
• A non-compliant passenger is something they are trained for. They follow their procedure. He won't leave. They follow their procedure and call in airport cops.
• The airport cops are thugs. They manhandle him, injure him and drag him. All recorded on camera phones.
• It explodes on the social networks. The company has no idea how to handle it, and botches that too.

Because so many things had to go wrong, the particular situation is not important. Rare things go wrong all the time. Junior staff at small airlines are not fully trained on contract nuances. Because things had never gone south like this before (and not in the way the plane was supposed to literally fly south) nobody had ever thought to write up procedures to remind gate crews that they can't remove passengers, and that they can't bump at all if it's not actually oversold.

Those of us writing so much about this online only really want to care about systemic problems. What is wrong with the system, not just one gate crew or flight crew. If there is a pattern of errors, what can be done to fix it.

Myth: That poor doctor!

I am hesitant to include this one, because I don't want to give the impression that I am defending in any way what happened to him, but it is an important fact. I am not saying anybody should be forcibly removed from a plane because the airline wants his seat. This was not just your ordinary passenger. Reports claim Dr. Dao lost his licence to practice medicine from 2003 to 2016 because he was convicted of trading prescription painkillers for sex, and his psych evaluations listed him as having anger management issues. One reason this escalated is that normally nobody dares to defy orders from the flight crew and especially from police. The orders were improper, and the bumped passengers deserve lots of compensation, but you have to attribute some portion of the blame for how far it escalated to Dr. Dao.

So, is overbooking evil or good?

The big question I have found most interesting is the subject of overbooking. Almost all airlines sell more seats on a plane than it actually has. They give you what they call a "confirmed reservation" and that name certainly makes people imagine they have a guaranteed seat on the plane. They don't, but they almost do, and that's as I will explain, a good thing for the flying public.

One basic statistic -- the no-show rate on flights is around 8%. So a plane with 100 seats, if it is considered "sold out" after 100 reservations. On average, with no overselling or standby pax, it would take off with 8 empty seats. The number is not the same for every flight. Complex algorithms predict the actual number based on history of that flight and the passengers.

Myth: The airlines primarily do this as a fraud to make money by selling the same seat twice

Turns out, when people don't fill their seat, only rarely does the airline get any money, or a profit from them. Airlines do make money from overbooking, but not the way you think. Most of those no-shows are because of late or cancelled connections. Those are money losers for the airline, big time. They have to rush to find another flight for that passenger, and get no money. Some of them are people who did free same-day changes or otherwise switched off the flight for low fee. A few have tickets with no change fees. A few more did a late flight change and paid a change fee. The change fee is sometimes as high as the ticket, but sometimes it's much less. The airline pockets the change fee, but not without cost -- the biggest one being they turned away passengers they would not have turned away because of the booking.

Update: More careful reading of United's Contract suggests both that this didn't fit the definition of an oversold flight, and that even if it did, they only have the power to "deny boarding" to a bumped passenger, not to remove them from an aircraft. If this is true, then this case is simple and much less interesting: UA/Republic should admit fault and compensate those involved and retrain staff. End of that part of the story. Later-update: This might might have involved a special "Must ride" classification put on the flight crew which changes the rule yet again.

I have a follow-on post on misconceptions and realities about these issues.

The viral video of the day is that of police pulling a main from a United Airlines flight. He doesn't want to go, and they pull him out, and bash his head on the armrest, then drag out his unconscious body. It's a nightmare for everybody, and the video sends clear chills into every viewer. (Once, after I changed my flight to fly home from Hawai`i with Kathryn, they involuntarily removed her from the plane for a crew member. I spent the flight next to an empty seat as the crew member went to the cockpit jumpseat, and she flew on a later flight that lost an engine. We've never flown on that airline again.)

In spite of that, I have some sympathy for both sides, and while clearly things went very wrong here, as even United will eventually admit, the more interesting question for me is "what should airlines do to make this work better"? I do believe that UA clearly didn't want this to happen, though their policies created a small risk that it would. I am sure they don't want it to happen again. So if you were the person writing the policy for these situations, what would you do?

The situation:

• This was UA3411, UA's 2nd last flight from ORD to Louisville. UA (or rather Republic airlines, a small regional flying under the United Express logo) had 4 flight crew who were needed for an early flight from Louisville and, I presume, had no other option for getting them there. (The next flight was obviously more oversold.) If they don't get there, and sleep the legally required amount, that flight is canceled and a whole lot of people don't fly, and a bunch of other flights are affected too. Aviation rules are strict on this.
• In an unusual situation, the four flight attendants are not expected. It is quite common for flight crew moving to their next job to be on flights and displace paying passengers, but unusual for it to be a surprise, to happen after the passengers have already boarded a full flight.
• So they ask ( as is required by law) for people to volunteer to get off in exchange for a reward. Unfortunately, all they can offer is a flight Monday afternoon. Nobody wants that, apparently, and the offer gets up to $800 plus hotel. Tickets on this 90 minute flight are only $187, but nobody wants the offer. That's also unusual.
• The law then gives the airline another option, involuntary bump. They tell the passengers they will do this if nobody volunteers. They select a pool of "low priority" passengers (those who took super-discount fares, removing elites and the disabled and a few others.) They pick 4 at random.
• 3 of those selected get off. The law requires they get a compensation of around $800 but in cash, not coupons. One, a doctor, refuses. He tells some people he has to see patients in the morning.
• They say the plane can't take off until this passenger leaves. He won't. They call the airport cops. The airport cops come to his seat to remove him.
• You can see what happens next on the video. He won't go. They physically try to pull him out. He screams and clings to the seat. They pull harder. He hits his head on the opposite armrest and is knocked out.
• They drag his limp form from the plane -- you can see that on video.
• Amazingly, he somehow gets back on the plane, bloodied and a bit confused. He keeps repeating, "I have to get home." He does not appear to be wearing leggings.

New information reveals that a whole bunch of things went wrong at once, which does not excuse police manhandling a passenger, but helps us understand why it went pear-shaped.

First, understanding overselling -- and why the flying public wants it

Most flights these days are oversold, because a lot of people don't show for their flights. The system of overselling, then calling for volunteers when too many show up makes the planes fly mostly full these days on many routes. It's a fact of flying and allowed in the law. It makes flight more efficient, perhaps 5-10% more. On competitive routes, that makes tickets cheaper for everybody. It has another benefit to the flying public -- more people get to fly on the flight they want, because the airline is willing to sell you a seat on a "full" flight, knowing that 99% of the time you and everybody else will actually get to fly. The alternative is that an empty seat flies, and you wastefully take another flight. Passengers really like more availability, though they don't directly see how it happens. The reality is many of the flights you see in your web search are technically oversold. If it is really sold out, it's actually oversold past their limit.

Airlines could elect to not oversell, or not oversell as much, but that comes with a cost. More people denied the flight they want. More expensive tickets. More emissions per passenger. The world doesn't want that, so the world allows and the law regulates, overselling.

Of course, there is a way to avoid ever being bumped. Pay more for your ticket, or be an elite flyer, as I am. (In fact, as an elite, they actually guarantee me a seat on "really, really sold out" flights 24 hours in advance, which really means they push their oversell percentage by plus-one for elites. If I do this -- I never have -- they just decide it is cheaper to pay a volunteer to get off the flight than to deny one of their elites the flight they need.)

So the most obvious solution, "Don't oversell," comes with a cost I don't think the airlines or flying public actually want. Consider it this way. A flight you need with 100 seats has had 100 bookings. The airline knows that on average 7 of them won't show up. Do you want the airline to let you "reserve" on that plane, or tell you "sorry, fly the next day?" Do you want them to only offer you a standby ticket because other people, who paid far less than you for their tickets and who barely fly on their airline, got there first? (And yes, those people who buy late pay a premium.) The airline hates taking off with an empty seat, but you hate being told you can't get on a flight that ended up with empty seats even more.

Airlines are getting quite good at it. In 2015, only .09% of passengers were bumped, and only .01% involuntarily.

The public wants bumping for flight crew, too!

Turns out, it's in the public interest that flight crew needed for another flight have higher priority than we do, even to the point of removing us from planes we already boarded. That may not be allowed, but one has to consider the difference between one person removed (voluntarily or not) with compensation and the very large group of people who will have their flight cancelled (sometimes with no compensation) if the flight crew doesn't get there, properly rested and ready. You don't want to be either, and utilitarianism is not always the right philosophy, but here the numbers are overwhelming. One guy doesn't fly or 70 people don't. So we want a system where that can happen, but smoothly and ideally voluntarily.

Understand involuntary bumping

Usually, the system of offering fat compensation -- $800, a hotel and meals for a $180 flight is a pretty good deal -- works fine. There are people who actually relish it. I met one guy who says he deliberately tries to get bumped the day before Thanksgiving -- when the offers get very high. But nobody was taking it. Most would miss a day of work, which is not an easy thing to do.

The law then allows the airlines to do an involuntary bumping. They have an algorithm that picks people and they are "denied boarding." The law specifies compensation. In this case 4 times the ticket price and other compensations. And this is cash, not flight coupons. Cash is worth a lot more.

This law is one of the culprits here. The law effectively puts a cap on the offer you will get. The airlines, in a move they thought at first was rational, don't want to offer you a lot more than the price the law defines for an involuntary bump. Why give a passenger $2,000 when you can do it for $1,000 under the law. Well, one reason is bad PR -- which is true in spades here.

The airlines don't want to do this. About 1 in 1,000 passengers are bumped, and 1 in 10,000 are involuntarily bumped, and has been going down as they get better at working their systems. But it happens.

Without the involuntary rule, the airline might have considered the next solution...

Make better offers for voluntary bumping

This problem would have been defused if they had kept increasing the offer until somebody took it. (Those who took it early will of course be upset, but that's how it goes.) While there is a practical limit, a volunteer should be found long before it.

They could also consider other things that are not money. Often bump offers come with things like first class upgrades which can be cheap for the airline and very nice to the passenger. They could offer a very coveted thing to some passengers -- elite qualification. At the extreme, if they offered 20,000 elite qualification miles or a full-tier bump in elite status, I could see even elite passengers jumping up to volunteer. We don't usually. We know we will never get involuntarily bumped. We usually have places to go. But we crave that elite status so much that some people fly "mileage runs" -- flights to nowhere just to accumulate miles -- to keep and increment it. If UA said, "get off this plane and we'll make you 1K" they would have had a line out the door of volunteers.

Earlier I posted my gallery of CES gadgets, and included a photo of the eHang 184 from China, a "personal drone" able, in theory, to carry a person up to 100kg.

Whether the eHang is real or not, some version of the personal automated flying vehicle is coming, and it's not that far away. When I talk about robocars, I am often asked "what about flying cars?" and there will indeed be competition between them. There are a variety of factors that will affect that competition, and many other social effects not yet much discussed.

The VTOL Multirotor

There are two visions of the flying car. The most common is VTOL -- vertical takeoff and landing -- something that may have no wheels at all because it's more a helicopter than a car or airplane. The recent revolution in automation and stability for multirotor helicopters -- better known as drones -- is making people wonder when we'll get one able to carry a person. Multirotors almost exclusively use electric motors because you must adjust speed very quickly to get stability and control. You also want the redundancy of multiple motors and power systems, so you can lose a rotor or a battery and still fly.

This creates a problem because electric batteries are heavy. It takes a lot of power to fly this way. Carrying more batteries means more weight -- and thus more power needed to carry the batteries. There are diminishing returns, and you can't get much speed, power or range before the batteries are dead. OK in a 3 kilo drone, not OK in a 150 kilo one.

Lots of people are experimenting with combining multirotor for takeoff and landing, and traditional "fixed wing" (standard airplane) designs to travel any distance. This is a great deal more efficient, but even so, still a challenge to do with batteries for long distance flight. Other ideas including using liquid fuels some way. Those include just using a regular liquid fuel motor to run a generator (not very efficient) or combining direct drive of a master propeller with fine-control electric drive of smaller propellers for the dynamic control needed.

Another interesting option is the autogyro, which looks like a helicopter but needs a small runway for takeoff.

The traditional aircraft

Some "flying car" efforts have made airplanes whose wings fold up so they can drive on the road. These have never "taken off" -- they usually end up a compromise that is not a very good car or a very good plane. They need airports but you can keep driving from the airport. They are not, for now, autonomous.

Some want to fly most of their miles, and drive just short distances. Some other designs are mostly for driving, but have an ability to "short hop" via parasailing or autogyro flying when desired.

I've seen many enraged notes from friends on how United Airlines will now charge for putting a bag in the overhead bin. While they aren't actually doing this, my reaction is not outrage, but actually something quite positive. And yours should be to, even when other airlines follow suit, as they will.

I fly too much on United. I have had their 1K status for several years, this year I logged over 200,000 miles, so I know all the things to dislike about the airline. Why is it good for them to do this?

We're on the cusp of a new wave of virtual reality and augmented reality technology. The most exciting is probably the Magic Leap. I have yet to look through it, but friends who have describe it as hard to tell from actual physical objects in your environment. The Hololens (which I have looked through) is not that good, and has a very limited field of view, but it already shows good potential.

My recent efforts in consulting and speaking have led to a lot more travel -- which is great sometimes, but also often a drain. I've been staying in so many hotels that I thought it worth enumerating some of the things I think every hotel room should have, and what I often find missing.

Most of these things are fairly inexpensive to do, though a few have higher costs. The cheaper ones I would hope can be just included, I realize some might incur extra charges or a slightly more expensive room, or perhaps they can be offered as a perk to loyalty program members.

Desk space for all occupants

Most rooms usually only have a workspace for one, even if it's a double room. The modern couple both have computers, and both need a place to work, ideally not crammed together. That's also true when two co-workers share a room. And in a perfect room, both desk spaces share the other attributes of a good desk, namely:

• The surface is not glass. I would say more than half the desks in hotel rooms are glass, which don't work well with optical mice. Sure, you put down some papers, but this seems kinda silly.
• Of course, 2 or even 3 power outlets, on the desk or wall above it. Ideally the "universal" kind that accept most of the world's plugs. (Sure, I bring adapters but this is always handy.) Don't make me crawl under the desk to plug things in, have to unplug something else.

To my horror, Marriott has been building some new hotels with no desk space at all. Some person (I would say some idiot) decided that since millennials use fewer laptops and just want to sit on a couch with their tablet, it was better to sacrifice the desk. Those hotels had better have folding desks you can borrow, in fact all hotels could do that to fix the desk space shortage, particularly if rooms are small. Another option would be a leaf that folds down from the wall.

Surfaces/racks for luggage and other things for everybody.

Many rooms are very lacking in table or surface space beyond the desk. Almost every hotel room comes with only one luggage holder, where a couple might find themselves with 3 or in rare case 4 bags. I doubt these folding luggage holders are that expensive, but if you can't put more than one in every room, then watch people as they check in, and note how many bags they have, and have somebody automatically send up some extra holders to their room. At the very least make it easy for them to ask. I mean these things are under $30 quantity one. Get more!

Bathrooms need surface space, too. Too often I've seen sinks with nowhere to put your toiletries and freedom bag. In fact, I want space everywhere to unpack the things I want to access.

Power by the bed (and other places)

Sure, I get that older hotel rooms did not load up with power outlets, and modern ones do. But aside from the desk, most people want power by the bed now, for their phone charger if nothing else. If you just have one plug by the bed, put a 3-way splitter (global plug, of course) on that plug so that people can plug things in without unplugging the light or clock. And ideally up high, so I don't have to crawl behind things to get at it.

A little more controversial is the idea of offering USB charging power. Today, we all carry chargers, but the hope is that if charging becomes commonplace, then like the travel hair dryer people used to carry and no longer do, we might be able to depend on finding a charger. Problem is, charging standards are many and change frequently -- we now have USB regular (useless) and fast-charge, along with Qualcomm quick-charge and USB C. More will come. On top of this, strictly you should not plug your device into a random USB port which might try to take it over. You can get what's called a "USB Condom" to block the data lines, but those might interfere with the negotiation phase of smarter power standards. A wireless "Qi" charging plate could be a useful thing.

As a couple, we have had up to 8 things charging at the same time, when you include phones, cameras, external batteries, headphones, tablets and other devices. So I bring a 5-way USB fast charger and rely on laptops or other chargers to go the distance.

Let me access the HDTV as a monitor, or give me a monitor.

Some rooms block you from any access to the TV. Some have a VGA or HDMI port built into a console on the desk. The latter is great, but usually the TV is mounted in a way that makes it not very useful as a computer monitor for working. It's primarily useful for watching video. I pretty much never watch video in a hotel room, so given the choice, I would put the monitor by the desk, and it should be 1080p or better -- in fact 4K should be the norm for any new installations. If you don't have one, have one I can call down for, even at a modest fee.

I'm doing a lot of flying these days for international speaking and consulting, and I try whenever possible to have 2 or more clients when I fly overseas, since the trips and time-changes can be draining.

In 2010, I proposed the idea of planes with no landing gear which land on robotic platforms. The spring loaded platforms are pulled by cables and so can accelerate and turn with multiple gees, so that almost no matter what the plane does, it can't miss the platform, and it can even hit hard with safety.

After 9/11 there was a lot of talk about how to prevent it, and the best method was to fortify the cockpit door and prevent unauthorized access. Every security system, however, sometimes prevents authorized people from getting access, and the tragic results of that are now clear to the world. This is likely a highly unusual event, and we should not go overboard, but it's still interesting to consider.

(I have an extra reason to take special interest here, I was boarding a flight out of Spain on Tuesday just before the Germanwings flight crashed.)

When Southwest started using tablets for in-flight entertainment, I lauded it. Everybody has been baffled by just how incredibly poor most in-flight video systems are. They tend to be very slow, with poor interfaces and low resolution screens. Even today it's common to face a small widescreen that takes a widescreen film, letterboxes it and then pillarboxes it, with only an option to stretch it and make it look wrong. All this driven by a very large box in somebody's footwell.

One of air travel's great curses is that you have to leave for the airport a long time before your flight. Airlines routinely "recommend" you be there 2 or 3 hours ahead, and airport ride companies often take it to heart and want to pick you up many hours before even short flights. The curse is strongest on short flights, where you can easily spend as much as twice the time getting to the flight as you spend in the air.

Dave Barry once wrote that there is a federal law that no two people on a plane can pay the same price for their seat. Airlines use complex systems to manage ticket prices, constantly changing them based on expected demand and competition, and with over a dozen fare classes with different rules.

In August, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) in London. I did it while in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho by means of a remote Telepresence Robot(*). The WorldCon is half conference, half party, and I was fully involved -- telepresent there for around 10 hours a day for 3 days, attending sessions, asking questions, going to parties. Back in Idaho I was speaking at a local robotics conference, but I also attended a meeting back at the office using an identical device while I was there.

Recently I tried Facebook/Oculus Rift Crescent Bay prototype. It has more resolution (I will guess 1280 x 1600 per eye or similar) and runs at 90 frames/second. It also has better head tracking, so you can walk around a small space with some realism -- but only a very small space. Still, it was much more impressive than the DK2 and a sign of where things are going. I could still see a faint screen door, they were annoyed that I could see it.

I've been on the road for the last month, and there's more to come. Right now I'm in Amsterdam for a few hours, to be followed by a few events in London, then on to New York for Singularity U's Exponential Finance conference, followed by the opening of our Singularity University Graduate Studies Program for 2014.

I wrote earlier on how we might make it easier to find a lost jet and this included the proposal that the pingers in the black boxes follow a schedule of slowing down their pings to make their batteries last much longer.

Why are there lines at airport security? I mean, we know why the lines form, when passenger load exceeds the capacity, with the bottleneck usually being the X-ray machines. The question is why this imbalance is allowed to happen?

The variable wait at airport security levies a high cost, because passengers must assume it will be long, just in case it is. That means every passenger gets there 15 or more minutes earlier than they would need to, even if there is no wait. Web sites listing wait times can help, but they can change quickly.

We've all learned a lot about what can and can't be done from the tragic story of MH 370, as well as the Air France flight lost over the Atlantic. Of course, nobody expected the real transponders to be disconnected or fail, and so it may be silly to speculate about how to avoid this situation when there already is supposed to be a system that stops aircraft from getting lost. Even so, here are some things to consider:

Southwest recently announced a very different approach to providing in-flight entertainment. Partnering with dish network they will offer live TV and on-demand programming over the in-plane WIFI to people's personal devices. Sadly, for now, it's just Apple devices. I will presume they will extend this to other platforms, including laptops, soon, and they should consider also allowing you to rent a tablet one-way if you don't have your own.

Just returned from an overseas trip to Moscow, I am reminded of the rant I posted earlier about the constant interruptions on the in-flight entertainment system.

Everything I said before remains valid: