Passengers waiting in a Qantas lounge of the future to board the airline’s aircraft of the future would be able talk to an intelligent personal assistant running advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to act as a personal companion and guide.

They would have already checked in sophisticated luggage that pairs with a Q bag tag to track belongings anywhere across the world. The smart travel companion would be able to follow its owner, weigh itself and could be remotely locked or unlocked.

As the passenger boards, sensors in the overhead lockers detect whether or not a locker is full and a LED strip indicates if there is space for carry-on luggage.

The traveller would settle into a business pod that would synchronise their personal devices with high definition screens complete with data feeds, video conferencing and a “surround’’ entertainment system that syncs with electronic pyjamas to allow passengers to feel their favourite movie.

 Mixed reality glasses with see-through holographic lenses will also provide digital experiences such as travel alerts and interactive entertainment.

These would be complemented by lightweight, wireless stereo earphones capable of blocking ambient noise and able to play up to 1,000 songs.

Helping passengers remain comfortable would be high-tech cushioning connected by Bluetooth to the personal inflight entertainment system. Sensors would monitor a passenger’s heart-rate, respiration, posture and sitting habits to provide personal health and comfort recommendations.

The system would alert them to poor posture or recommend when it was time to do a lap of the cabin.

A smart cup would also monitor water intake and alert customers to the need to hydrate recommend optimum consumption levels for particular beverages.

And for those wanting to go a step further, an adjustable headset could monitor brainwaves and adjust the environment, mealtimes and entertainment to their emotional state.

Meanwhile, smart LED strips would project the outside view or scenes such as an ocean dawn or desert night sky on the cabin roof. 

The aircraft would be powered by biofuel produced from sustainable sources to reduce its impact on the environment and datalinks to ground staff would boost safety.

Qantas admits some ideas for its aircraft of the future concept may be of the "blue sky'' variety but it argues aviation has been, and will always be, a source of great innovation.

“It’s why airlines and aircraft manufacturers are constantly trying to evolve the customer experience,’’ a spokesman says. “Qantas has a proud record of pushing the boundaries being the first airline to operate jet services across the Pacific and in 1971 we were the first airline to introduce Business Class.

“It remains to be seen how many of these concepts get off the ground but rapid improvements in technology are allowing us to already use big data to analyse the best flight paths across the Pacific and give customers the ability to stream entertainment to their own devices.’’

In fact, many airlines are taking a hard look at what the technology in new “connected’’ planes can offer as technology continues to change the way people travel. On-board Wi-fi, once shunned by travellers, is now being widely adopted to provide the inflight connectivity craved by a new generation of passengers .

Technology company SITA estimates the proportion of airlines offering on-board internet to passenger’s devices will jump from roughly a third today to 74 per cent by 2019, with 70 per cent offering multimedia file streaming.

Departure halls have already been transformed by the introduction of self-service kiosks and the International Air Transport Association expects this to continue with the migration to smartphone  apps that allow people to check in outside the airport. This may one day render on-airport check-in facilities obselete, according to some predictions.

SITA expects mobile phone boarding passes, already widespread, to be “almost universal’’ by 2019 and believes almost half of airlines will offer smartwatch boarding by this date.

More than half of airlines are expected to trial wearable technologies over the next decade and there will be a similar move towards a single biometric travel token for identity management.

A smaller but sill significant 44 per cent say they will look at artificial intelligence in the next 10 years and 37 per cent expect to look at virtual reality.

A number of airlines have already joined Qantas in using streaming technology to allow people to access inflight entertainment on their own devices and there is a big move towards phone apps that provide functionality beyond a boarding pass.  Air New Zealand customers, for example, can order a barista-made coffee before they arrive at the airport lounge.

Other  ground-based technology that aims to make trips simpler  includes  biometric bag drops and a plethora of apps that do everything from booking a flight to helping you pack or checking to see if a better seat is available.

Some of those apps, such as Kayak and Worldmate, consolidate the flow of information to give fingertip access to hotel and flight bookings while building an itinerary and allowing you track flights.

Hopper analyses billions of airfares each day to predict future flight prices and tell travellers the best time to book. Its makers claim it predicts future price prices with 95 per cent accuracy and it has already collectively saved users tens of millions of dollars.

Seat Alerts monitors available seats and lets you know if a window or aisle seat becomes available so you can jump on the phone to the airline.

Apps also help travellers navigate unfamiliar airports, where negotiating passport control is getting  easier with the increasing use of technology that uses biometric information stored electronically on passports to process travellers through automated gates.

Technology is also beginning to ease the pain of negotiating security checkpoints as airports look at new security scanners that cut queues and allow people to leave items such as laptops in bags.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and London’s Luton Airport have introduced computed tomography (CT) scanners which generate 360-degree three-dimensional images able to more quickly process bags and cut wait times by as much as half. The scanners also include automated belts that pull bags into the machine and return empty trays to the start of the checkpoint.

The technology, which has also been trialled at Singapore’s Changi Airport and is due to be part of pilot program in Phoenix involving American Airlines, is able to run bags continuously through the system without the need to remove liquids, gels or laptops.

Airfares would have to triple if aviation regulators were to re-certify aircraft to the reality of recent chaotic passenger evacuations.

The evacuation of the burning American Airlines Boeing 767 at Chicago airport on Friday is a carbon copy of the accidents over the past few years with most passengers carrying their baggage with them.

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Passengers are risking their lives, and those of fellow passengers, with the obsession of taking cabin baggage with them in an emergency.

Aircraft are certified on the basis of all passengers off in 90 seconds with half the exits out of use. 

The stark reality is it takes three times longer – and sometimes more – with passengers slowing the process by grabbing bags.

In the evacuation certification tests, the “passengers” are aircraft manufacturer employees who know the drill and they have no baggage.

If regulators were to re-certify the long-range Boeing 777 to the reality of what actually happens, the 550 exit limit aircraft would have to be recertified to just 183 passengers – half its typical load. 

But for smaller aircraft such as the widely used A320 – and Boeing 737 – which has an exit limit of 195 and a typical configuration of 180 mostly economy passengers the impact would be devastating with a new limit of just 65.

That would mean a tripling of airfares to make the aircraft economically viable.

The impact on the industry and the world economy would be devastating but something needs to be done before hundreds die in an aircraft evacuation. 

And authorities are already stirring. Last year after a British Airways incident at Las Vegas the highly respected British Civil Aviation Authority issued a blunt warning to its airlines: Stop passengers taking their hand luggage off with them in an emergency evacuation!

This is how passengers evacuated in the Airbus A380 certification test.

The airline industry needs to take decisive action, perhaps by locking overhead lockers for takeoff and landing, to prevent passengers taking their baggage with them after a plane crash.

Or an extreme measure would be to ban carry-on baggage other than a small bag such as a back pack.

It is sobering to consider that it quite often takes 40 minutes to board a plane because of passenger/ baggage congestion.

Not only does taking your baggage dramatically slow the process, there’s a distinct possibility that the bags with protruding metal parts will snag and then deflate the escape slides — rendering them useless.

And in the scramble to get overstuffed bags out of lockers, passengers may be knocked out and the aisle blocked for precious seconds.

There is also the very real prospect of passengers jumping on to the escape slide with their bag and knocking themselves or another passenger out, or even killing them.

Duty-free alcohol is even more lethal because if the bottle breaks there is flammable liquid everywhere, not to mention broken glass.

In a related development, passengers in these disasters are turning them into social media events by taking video and pictures and then trying to be the first to upload the images to Facebook or Twitter.

Complicating matters airlines are not enforcing carry-on baggage limits for competitive reasons, says Steven Reed, National Industrial Officer with the Flight Attendants Association of Australia.

“There is a very real potential for a catastrophe,” Mr Reed told AirlineRatings.com.

The combination of passengers not listening, larger and heavier bags and more aggression and defiance from air travellers is a perfect storm, suggests Mr Reed.

Tragically, it will take a disastrous evacuation with multiple deaths for the industry to act.
 

American Airlines Boeing 767-300, registered N345AN, operating flight AA383 from Chicago to Miami with 161 passengers and 9 crew, aborted its take-off and has caught fire.

The flight was well down runway 28R when the pilots rejected the takeoff  because of a suspected uncontained engine failure and fire.

Crew initiated an emergency evacuation and  20 people were taken to hospital with minor injuries.

The 767-300 sustained significant damage.

Many passengers filmed the evacuation.

Once again passengers have risked their safety and that of their fellow passengers by insisting on taking their carry-on baggage with them.

Video of the inside of the 767 taken during the evacuation shows many baggage bins open while passengers can be seen with their carry on baggage.

Read: Grab for bags could cause airfares to triple

Jet engines are designed with a containment ring to prevent the shrapnel generated by disintegrating parts from tearing through the cabin or fuel tanks but in rare cases this does not work.

A source told Reuters the failure in this case was so intense a disk from the CF-6 engine  hit a nearby building roof.

The news agency said  US National Transportation Safety Board officials were looking for clues as to whether the fault lay with the engine, with maintenance or a freak event such as debris on the runway entering the engine.

GE spokesman Rick Kennedy told it on Saturday that the plane engine dated from the 1980s or 1990s and had been serviced by the airline.

Qantas will defy a global trend to cram more people into aircraft when it launches its new Boeing 787-9 “Dreamliner” aircraft and gives back to economy class passengers an inch of legroom.

The airline announced today that it will increase the seat pitch on its new economy seats from the 31 inches (78.8cms) found on its Airbus A380s to 32 inches on its new flagship Dreamliner.

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“The Dreamliner is an aircraft built for comfort,’’ Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said. “The windows are bigger, it helps reduce jetlag, it’s extremely quiet and there’s a system that smooths out turbulence. Customers are going to love it.

“We’re planning to make the most of the 787’s amazing range, so we’ve designed the cabin to give Qantas passengers a better experience on long haul flights.’’

The airline unveiled the business class and economy product for the new airliner but not its “class-leading and revolutionary” premium economy seats.

The aircraft will seat 236 passengers: 42 in business on seats that are an evolution of its acclaimed Thomson Aero Seating A330 suites, 166 in next generation economy seats and  28 in the premium economy cabin. The overall seat count is less than that of competitors such as  United Airlines, which seats 252 on its equivalent planes,  and Air New Zealand,  which has  292 seats on its 787-9.

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While Qantas promised its premium economy seats will be “streets ahead of anything out there’’, all it revealed today was a roomy 2-3-2 configuration ahead of details to be released early next year. Although Qantas was a late adopter of premium economy its current product is highly regarded so industry interest in the new cabin will be high.

The brainchild of Australian industrial designer David Caon, the next generation Recaro economy seats, will be in a 3-3-3 configuration and offer a 6-inch seat recline. They are fitted with a bigger 12-inch high definition touch screen and a personal electronic device holder that will allow users to set up a tablet.

A standard personal reading light will be complemented by Individual mood lighting will be integrated into the back of each seat to help reduce disruption to other passengers.

The seats feature additional stowage for a water bottle, literature and small personal items as well as individual USB charging and shared PC power.
Qantas has also updated the “footnet” introduced in the A380 and designed to cradle the legs during sleep.

A potential downside is that the economy seats will be only 17.2 inches wide and narrower than rival Virgin Australia’s Boeing 777-300ER economy seats, which are 18.5 inches wide in a nine-across configuration and also sport a 32-inch seat pitch. The 787 seats are also marginally tighter than the 17.5-inch wide economy seats on Qantas A380s and close to the 17-inch wide seats that have caused consumer unhappiness on 10-across Boeing 777s.

However, Boeing studies have shown that most passengers would rather an extra inch of legroom over an extra inch of shoulder room.  The aircraft manufacturer also says that the 787’s much larger windows give passengers a greater sense of space.

At the Singapore Air Show in February,  Boeing Commercial Airplanes vice president of marketing Randy Tinseth told Australian Aviation that an independent survey by Mindset of economy class cabins of 10 airlines showed 48.2 per cent of respondents found the 787 cabin to be “very spacious”, compared to 34.5 per cent for the Airbus A380 and 17.3 per cent for the A330.

Mr Tinseth said that on the comfort aspect the survey found that 45.3 per cent gave the 787 cabin a big tick as “very comfortable”, compared to 34.2 per cent for the A380 and 20.5 per cent for the A330.

Regardless of the width debate in economy,  it will be all smiles in the high-yielding premium economy and business class cabin. The aircraft’s 42 business class seats will be in a 1-2-1 configuration that guarantees all passengers direct aisle access and boast a comfortable 80-inch (203cm) flat bed, a new deployable privacy divider as well as 16-inch touch screens.

Like the A330 seats, they can be reclined during take-off and landing and all have ample space to work, good storage as well as in-seat USB and PC charging.

“Many of the cabin design elements reflect what our customers have told us,’’ Mr Joyce said. “Personal storage rates really highly, so we’ve created extra space in Economy for customers to store their personal devices and water bottles.

“We’re proud that our new economy seat includes features other carriers reserve for premium economy.

“We’re also redesigning the in-flight experience for the Dreamliner, from rethinking our menus to making better use of the self-service bars during different phases of flight.’’

Qantas has yet to confirm new routes for the Dreamliners but has said they will gradually take over routes currently operated by its Boeing 747s such as Sydney-Johannesburg.

But its decision to go for a lower seat count should mean it can fly further and mooted new routes include London-Perth, Dallas-Melbourne or Dallas-Brisbane.

The first international 787 flights will go on sale before Christmas and the airline will announce early next year the first ultra-long route.

The world is watching as the Obama White House, in its last months in power, forces through new rules backing air travellers that it says will lead to a more competitive market.

The rule changes in the world's biggest domestic air travel market have been rammed through by Democrat President Barack Obama's hand-picked transportation secretary, Anthony Foxx, using so-called executive orders so that they bypass debate in the hostile Republican-controlled Congress and Senate.

And, instead of being hailed as useful reforms, they have been met with either indifference or hostility by the American aviation industry media, as well as by the airlines.

In the first of the rule changes, the Department of Transportation (DOT) has announced that, by the end of the year, online travel retailers will be prohibited from "undisclosed biasing of flight offerings on behalf of certain airlines".

Foxx says the rule stems from "a concern certain agents may be offering flights based on relationships with certain carriers” rather than providing a neutral rundown of offerings based on fares or schedules.

“We want to make sure we get as much transparency as possible,” Air Transport World quoted Foxx as saying.

But, like most government meddling in competitive markets the DOT is either implementing or contemplating, critics have pointed out that the potential for unforeseen consequences is everywhere.

For a start, mandating what relationships airlines and their suppliers may have with each other effectively abolishes competition in the chosen area.

The second rule change mandated by the DOT is an expansion of the gathering of performance statistics to "stop airlines from data cherry-picking", according to a briefing by the White House – an indication of how seriously the Obama administration is taking the changes. 

From January 2018, US domestic airlines will be required to report competitive data, such as on-time performance, for all airlines that fly under their brand names and not just the mainline carriers. By expanding data-gathering to include all airlines with more than 0.5 per cent of industry revenue (market share) from the current one per cent, that rule is designed to capture regional affiliate airlines and some minor niche players that current aren't required to report.

On the face of it, though it won't affect travellers in a major way, that is a useful reform as the US has been the world leader in publishing competitive information that consumers can use to choose their carrier when booking travel.

The US was the first jurisdiction to publish on-time performance statistics so consumers can see which airlines are punctual and which aren't.
However, critics point out that by targeting smaller airlines, the compliance burden will fall on those least able to pay for the extra staff required. Regional airlines in America are notorious for their wafer-thin margins and bankruptcies are common.

The DOT has also signalled it is proposing two future rules – the first to require airlines to refund baggage fees when luggage is "substantially delayed"; the second requiring airlines to disclose an "all-up" fare that includes optional fees for items such as baggage, seat assignment and booking change or cancellation.

These two areas open a giant can of worms as they involve potentially large financial penalties for airlines.

Incredibly, the DOT doesn't even know what a "substantial delay" is. Rather than proposing that, say, a sliding scale of penalties will apply if baggage is lost for more than 24 hours, the department says it is still soliciting comments on what constitutes a "substantial delay". 

In any case, critics say the DOT appears determined to eliminate competition between airlines on conditions of carriage for baggage and incentives they may use to win business.

But it is the second area of future rule-making that has airline managers alarmed as it suggests regulation of the new centrepiece of airline pricing, optional extras or ancillary revenue.

"DOT will be conducting a rulemaking to explore whether airlines should be required to share fee information for such services or products (like baggage, advance seat assignments and priority boarding) with ticket agents, so that customers can get an all-in-one price when they shop online," the White House briefing says.  

"DOT will also determine which fees will have to be included, potentially including baggage fees, seat assignment fees, and change and cancellation fees.

The DOT is talking of forcing airlines to disclose "all-up pricing" and seems to suggest that optional items should be included.

While such a ruling looks like it would be unworkable, it would also see the government meddling with airline marketing of their products to consumers.
Other jurisidictions such as Australia have much more stringent consumer laws than the US and insist only that airlines must declare compulsory fees, while optional extras are fine.

Needless to say, the airline industry is scathing of Washington's latest actions.

"It would be difficult to find an industry that is more transparent than the airline industry; customers always know exactly what they are paying for before they buy," says Airlines for America (A4A) president and chief executive Nick Calio. "Dictating to the airline industry distribution and commercial practices would only benefit those third parties who distribute tickets, not the flying public.”