Volcanos, Airlines, Propellers and #Collapsonomics

From David Weinberger:

Here are the things that I could not do over the Internet when, just as we were about to go through passport control for our trip to New York, the Barcelona Airport closed:

We could not find information about the closing posted on the Web when we needed it at the airport.

Email notifications from American Airlines about the flight delay and then cancellation came about an hour after the news was spread in the airport.

It was not possible rebook a flight using the American Airlines web site. That required a two-hour phone call to AA.

The Spanish train service’s site would not take orders for tickets. It contained no information about how to proceed, or about the multi-hour wait-times at the Barcelona station where tickets are sold.

There was no updated information about ticket availability for various trains. Nor was that information accessible at the train station except by waiting on a three hour line.

There was no obvious way to get information about the availability of rental cars, buses, cabs, or people willing to drive you to Madrid in their own car.

As far as I can tell, only three online services actually helped the stranded traveller: Twitter (see the #ashtag hashtag), Skype, and good old email.

This was not the Internet’s fault. It was moving bits faster than Icelandic volcanoes move ash. But the services built on the Net were tested by a non-lethal international crisis and crapped out. Oh, I’m sure there are cool and useful sites ‘n’ services, but I’m a fairly sophisticated Net user, and I didn’t find them, and what I did find seems not to have been built to work during times of crisis. ,p>Makes you wonder about the implications for national security…

Some of the comments to the piece were interesting, like this one:

I was thinking yesterday, that if I were an airline, I would have deployed Twitter, Facebook etc. and a bank of social media-trained customer service reps. I would have had widgets and other “immediate” content on my webpages with up-to-the-minute information about airport closures, delays, and links.

Would have fed that dynamic content to airline gates, ticketing agents, and other locations.

The complaint seems to be a lack of information. It’s not that the information is lacking, it’s that companies such as airlines (and governments) haven’t learned how to disseminate the information they do have as nimbly as they could.

I recall similar after 9/11 (I was there) - no power, no water, all the mobile nets were down, sporadic fixed line telephony, no traffic after a few hours, and no sensible information on what was working or happening (but speculation on all the media channels abounded). Made me realise how thin the veneer of modern civilisation is even in the most sophisticated places.

This is the sort of stuff the Collapsonomics crew think about, i.e. what do you do when these sort of rare - but predictable - events occur. Not so much "Black Swans", these are "Black Elephants". Volcanoes are known to spew ash every so often and we know its crap for jet engines. Its such a good disaster story I'm amazed that Michael Crichton or someone didn't see it coming

By taking down air transport its taking down the great physical "real time" comms medium we have on the planet. Now what is even more interesting is that volcanoes like this one can sputter on for months, years even. Imagine if Europe was aircraftless for 2 years! How would its economic development compare vis a vis other parts of the world that were not?

The answer, of course, would be propeller planes. In the disaster movie someone will no doubt write, the hero and heroine discover an old WW2 aircraft that operated in the desert and had proper dust filters on, and make good their escape while the Bad Guy's jet fighter flames out due to too much dust up his turbofan.

As movie buffs will know, the P-40 is obligatory in these sort of Future History moves, so that is what they will use - the one above is a South African Air Force P-40, and they had to use sand filters on their planes in the Sahara Desert and Italy - and still do even today with their modern aircraft in the dusty bits of Africa.