·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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An easy way to earn Jason’s two thumbs up rating: three flights, no accidents!

Seriously, I hate to fly.  Think about how your body reacts when you get into some emergency situation and your survival instincts kick in.  You know how your pulse rate climbs, your heart pounds and you become very alert and aware of the things around you?  Well, imagine being in that state for the entire duration of every flight that you are ever on, and that is why I hate flying.  I can’t explain to you why it happens, it just does.

Jenny finally talked me into flying to Disney World for our recent vacation and there were several things about Southwest that I liked.  First, while the flight to Orlando was delayed a bit, the rest were actually early. I also enjoyed the humor of the flight attendants… “If at any time you are not satisfied with our service, there are six exits from the plane – two front, two center, two rear!”  While it may be corny, it does help people to relax… an ever so little bit.

In addition, I would compare the financial and safety success of Southwest with that of Honda.  Unlike American car makers, Honda does not have hundreds of models with thousands of options.  Instead, they offer about a dozen vehicles and maybe four variations of each.  This strategy surely results in less overhead and costs.  Not only does it save on tooling, parts, training, etc for the number of combinations, but it allows them to concentrate on the important details instead of managing all that complexity.  So it is with Southwest.  Check out fleet statistics for the major carriers – Southwest’s fleet is made up entirely of Boeing 737s, of which they use  three different models.  The same can probably be said for their selection of cities served.  They don’t fly everywhere under the sun, but they hit a good number of major locations.

Finally, Lindsay really likes the colors of their planes.

One other cool thing from my travels… check out flightaware.com – very cool tracking of live flight data.

Bob Cringely hits it on the head in this blog post.  In commenting about an erroneous chart that made the rounds on Wall Street without the fairly obvious problem being noticed, he says:

How could this be?  It’s because Wall Street doesn’t work the way we think it does — the way we are led to believe it does.  Wall Street is a marketplace, a selling ground where everything from ideas to stocks and bonds are on sale every day.  And there is nobody easier to sell to than a salesman. Come up with a good chart that’s ALMOST within an order of magnitude of reality, put a disclaimer on the bottom, and let ‘er rip.

No wonder we’re in a global financial crisis.

The people we count on to understand what’s going on can’t even read a chart.

Yeah, let’s give these people some more federal bailout money.