The joys of databases. They can re-write an entire story with one drop-down selection and everyone can blame it on the computer not having enough detailed selections available.
The reality is, hub-and-spoke is utterly broken as a system once something gets out of whack -- it propagates through the system as a cascading failure. There's no redundancy and no backup plan.
At today's ticket prices and competition levels, there's zero slack in the system to alleviate the wave until the traffic load dies down in the middle of the night and the guys and gals on Reserve are called in to reposition critical aircraft and/or the morning flights are cancelled because equipment is out of position and isn't worth flying it around empty to service the paid customers, because a full flight might only Net the airline a few hundred bucks. The computer decides.
The carriers also compete in "on-time performance" and are masters at that. I can't tell you how many times we pushed 737s off the gate far enough to turn the wheel around one full revolution then asked the cockpit to pull the breaker do we could open the bays back up and finish loading. That was a nightly occurrence at Stapleton in 1993 or so. Pilots usually had mercy on us rampies during a glycol-doused night in the snow. They'd take the hit or write it up as an ATC delay.
The smart FO would give a spiel about an ATC delay, "so we have some time to make sure your bags make this flight". That was always entertaining on the ground phones on the aircraft that mixed the PA into the intercom so the tug driver or lead on the gate could hear it.
We laughed and kept loading. As fast as two guys could button up the last bin, we'd back the belt loader away a foot, guy sitting on the belt would secure the door, and hang on because the belt loader was already in reverse with the other guy's foot on both the gas and the brake. 20' later you'd tumble off the thing hopefully on your feet and run to the other side of the aircraft while pulling your safety wands from your grimy glycol covered jumpsuit pocket.
(Never in front of a 737, it'd suck you through an engine and you'd be pink toothpaste all over the ramp.)
By the time you made it to the wingtip on the far side (junior guy's job, belt loader driver got to stay on the bin side) the aircraft was already 20 feet off the gate and the gate lead had the Paymover floored.
Half jog, half run along the wingtip on the slippery snowy ramp knowing full well that if you held up your sticks in an X for STOP, the Paymover driver couldn't see you in the snowstorm anyway.
Panting from running in the snow, finally your wingtip would pivot and stay still long enough for you to look and see if the aircraft was about to hit anything.
If you were lucky, you'd see the other company aircraft unhooking from a tug 30' behind. Ha. He's stuck now.
Left side guy wouldn't be at his wingtip by now, he's letting the turn bring the nosegear to him. Angling in for the kill, he'd arrive at the towbar the second the Paymover guy slowed to a stop, snag the headset from the driver, yank the pin out of the towbar and wave the tug off, which would take off at full throttle for the parking spot at the gate, and climb underneath to put the nosewheel steering arm into the wheels (if it was a 727), thank the cockpit and jog toward the warming room. See ya tomorrow night!
Unless it was a bad night and someone was sitting in the penalty box and could fit into our gate.
If so, we'd have gotten the radio call, and we'd just stay right where we were and be ready to hold our stupid sticks up in the snow that no one could see anyway and act all Safety-like while the Captain parked the jet.
Lead would plug in the headset he'd been handed by the jogging left-side guy who jogged back out halfway between the wingtip and the catering truck that had magically appeared in the snow, and then would plug in the ground power umbilical...
And we'd zip the belt loaders up to the doors and I'd crawl into some new mess of unorganized bags and boxes and start tossing them out as fast as the belt loader would turn the belt.
(Our team would hunt down the belt loaders that ran fastest against their governors and steal them from other gates, replacing them with slower ones that had been parked on our gate by the day crews. Nobody messed with our belt loaders. If anyone complained, our Puerto Rican guy on the left wingtip would crank up his accent and gibber at the other gate crew in a mix of English and made up crap and act all excited until they went away, while I and the lead would give them a look of, "Oh NOW you've done it!" When we stole them, we always acted like it was to fuel them up, but we knew the fast ones by the numbers painted on them. Our lead's little secret. I went on many a scouting mission between pushes, driving a slow belt loader around looking for old number 18. She was the fastest. Governor probably broke. Ha. Wait until the other crew went inside to warm up, and swap belt loaders. Always brought the new one with a full tank of gas, at least.)
We always made sure the USPS bags went on first. Cash money for the airline and fines if it didn't make the flight.
A coffin also got priority once in a while (head first, bodies leak, but airliners always have a slightly positive deck angle forward to rear except in the descent)... again, cash money.
Freight and then bags. Bags were always last.
The last nightly inbound 727 from Seattle always had one hold full of slimy boxes of frozen fish, which always made the flight to DEN no matter how late the aircraft was, but sometimes you'd open up the second bay and no bags.
Bummer folks, the fish made it for your landlocked Denver restaurants tomorrow, but your bags are in Seattle until tomorrow morning at the earliest.
Worst was if they filled both bins with bags literally thrown on and not stacked, and didn't put the cargo net up between the bags and the slime fish boxes in a hurry at SEA.
Luggage is here, but we coated it in fish slime for you! (That one usually got the Supervisor over and he'd call a complaint in to Ops on his radio for the loading crew in SEA, who all went home on-time hours before and didn't care...)
Those messes always happened when the company was pushing for "zero overtime this week". Throw bags as fast as you can and hurry to clock out on time tonight, boys! Off the clock by 1AM or else!
Try not to look too disgusted if you're at the cart end of the belt loader so people looking out the windows of the airplane don't notice the glistening of fish slime on their bags, and the boxes stacked in the other cart that say "frozen fish" in huge letters.
If you're unaware, junior rampies get "manual load" aircraft. Senior ramp rats bid to work the container-load birds.
Hydraulics. Containers. Nice. I was very junior.
Got to see the low, cramped, insides of all three bins of the Long Beach Death Tube up close, and personal. With only one person up there, you got REALLY good at throwing even the heaviest bags airborne from the belt loader to the front bulkhead while on your hands and knees.
If it said Fragile, you might hold back, or you might throw it harder if you were three inbound flights in the "push" behind and the stupid MD-80 showed up in the middle of it, out of sequence.
So... forcing a ticket agent to make notes on passenger's tickets about Dispatcher Games, isn't going to change it one bit. It's probably gotten worse, not better. My stories are almost two decades old.
