11 May 2007
Airplane lavatories to disappear
Micturition prohibition
CHICAGO, Ill. -- In business—any business—there are very few
(legal) ways to boost profits: increase revenue and/or cut costs. In the
highly competitive airline business, the
 emphasis for several years has
been on the latter.
Personnel costs were a first, easy target: fewer workers, less cost.
That strategy has, for the most part, been played out. So airlines are
now implementing more subtle cost-cutting measures that take aim at
reducing the weight of airplanes and of the contents they take aloft.
"The math here is simple, and so are the potential savings,"
says
Alyson Challren, an airline efficiency consultant. "For every five pounds an
airplane carries for an hour, it burns one pound of fuel. And with jet
fuel prices rising just like they are for your automobile, you can see
why the airlines are looking to reduce weight wherever possible."
Toward that end, airlines have been skipping on paint
jobs, eliminating on-board magazines, removing seats, even setting up
subsidiary airlines for naked flyers. Now
Travel Fox has learned that Monument Airlines will soon be taking more
"personal"
weight-reducing/cost-cutting measures. The targets this time: airplane
lavatories.
Next month Monument will begin removing about half of the
lavatories from airplanes used on its transatlantic flights. That will
be followed later in the year with the removal of half of the lavatories
in the rest of its fleet. Completion of the project is expected by the
first of the year.
To accommodate the reduction, the airline will limit the number of times
each passenger is allowed access to an on-board lavatory. Boarding passes
for each passenger will be imprinted with a code that, when inserted
into an optical reader in a lavatory door, will allow access to the
compartment. According to company memos, the allotted number of
passenger accesses
will be a function of route, distance and passenger load.
The reasoning behind Monument's moves was explained by Challren.
"It takes about a
gallon of fuel to carry the amount of water needed to flush a lavatory
toilet four times," she said. "Assuming that the average passenger uses the lavatory
0.42 times per hour (the airlines actually keep these statistics) then
the cost of fuel just to carry the water to flush the toilets on a
Boeing 747 flight from Chicago to London can exceed $87,400."
Challren also pointed out that Monument is able to add an additional 3
rows of seats for each lavatory removed, thus increasing the plane's
load factor.
Passengers will be able to use frequent flyer miles or purchase additional lavatory visits when they make
reservations. In flight, the
optical readers in the lavatory doors will also accept credit cards. The
charge for
each additional access is expected to be $1.25.
Related Travel Fox scoops:
Related Err Travel columns:
© 2007 Applied Psychology
|
|
