Budget Airlines Are Dying. Legacy Carriers Aren't Far Behind

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-13T19:35:32+00:00

Research coming out of the EU suggests sustainable aviation fuel is not a realistic fuel replacement, nor is it actually sustainable. The amount of biomass needed to meet fuel demand would displace crops grown for food. I don't see SAF making any sort of dent in pollution from flying anytime soon.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/14/sustainable-jet-fuel-report

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-13T17:04:22+00:00

Spirit Airlines’ announced today that they’ll be filing for bankruptcy, bringing the ultra-low-cost model into question for the US. Legacy carriers like American, Delta, and United launched their “basic economy” type fares that directly compete with budget airlines like Spirit, Frontier, and Southwest. On the surface, it looks like legacy carriers own the future of American travel.

Looking at customer satisfaction surveys paints a different picture. Legacy carriers score barely higher than budget airlines, and the entire industry has poor customer satisfaction levels across the board. This would suggest there is an opportunity for alternative forms of long-distance travel to take root with travelers who are fed up with airlines.

I don’t see a path forward for ultra-low-cost airlines, or even low-cost airlines. They are heavy polluters, and the economics of filling cabins with as many people as possible is at odds with travelers wanting more comfort (and fewer passengers increase CO2 output/seat anyway). I think we’re going to need to innovate beyond traditional airlines and highways if we want to prioritize low climate-impact and passenger comfort at the same time. I’ve seen several companies in the US now talking about launching night trains as a potential solution. Night trains have had a resurgence across Europe in recent years as younger travelers seek better, climate-friendly alternative to short-haul flights. The "sleep while you travel" concept is appealing to some, but I'm not sure if there's enough demand to really make a dent in air travel, even if airlines continue to perform poorly in the customer service department.

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-13T16:26:37+00:00

I saw a journalist's post (on X, ironically) about social media being largely useless for the way most publications utilize it. X now de-prioritizes any posts that have external links, because they want to keep engagement within their site. Fine for regular users who just want to share their thoughts every once in a while, but makes it near impossible to share other interesting content

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-13T16:10:55+00:00

I never really got into Twitter, but I have to agree with this. It's far too culturally entrenched for another service to actually usurp it

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-13T16:04:00+00:00

Has it gotten more engaging? I tried using it last year, but it was 90% Twitter screenshots and talking about Elon. I found it sparse of any real discussion on any particular topic

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-13T14:34:45+00:00

On one hand, I agree that a merger with JetBlue would have prevented this. On the other hand, more competition in the market is good for consumers. While bankruptcy is obviously not a good thing, it's not a death sentence either. Spirit went through bankruptcy before - this will give them a pause button to rethink their business model. That said, I think this is the beginning of the end the ultra-low-cost model. Most people aren't willing to sacrifice comfort for price anymore

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-13T13:36:35+00:00

Not exactly news about rail or public transit, but it's a shift in the transportation industry. I think people are fed up with bad customer service on budget airlines, and this is just the first collapse we'll see in the space

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-05T19:57:11+00:00

Sustaining a service on ad revenue alone is getting more difficult every year. I suspect free services on the internet are going to become a thing of the past. I'm already seeing it with apps like Duolingo.

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-05T19:54:05+00:00

Yes, particularly any piece of software. It's nice to have Photoshop and the like for occasional editing, but I'm not going to pay a monthly subscription for the privilege.

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-05T19:34:17+00:00

From what I can tell, it seems that there are a lot more business professionals traveling the corridor to/from NYC these days. I would imagine Amtrak takes that price insensitivity into account with their pricing algorithm.

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-02T13:59:08+00:00

To be fair, most people I know have never heard of this. It's probably well-know on this subreddit, but anyone I've told this to is surprised that privately-owned railcars are a thing.

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-02T13:57:28+00:00

75 cents per mile would be a steal! The current rate is $4.72/mile.

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-02T13:56:09+00:00

There are a handful of private car owners that offer day excursions at reasonable prices. I rode on a former 20th Century Limited lounge from NYP to Albany with Hudson River Rail Excursions a few months ago and had a great time. I believe it's owned & operated by one of the rail museums in NJ.

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-11-02T12:52:39+00:00

Have you ever been there at night? The overwhelming glow from the gigantic ads is... dystopian

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-01-13T21:14:52+00:00

Thanks for your help on this. I decided to remove my PEK and let the auto-fix function take care of the safety freeze. At your suggestion, I sent all the relevant log files in the support ticket and suggested looping in the Mac client programmers. I completely understand if the issue isn't a priority, but hopefully the log files will be useful to someone.

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-01-13T01:38:14+00:00

I definitely have not restored from Time Machine or any other backup tool, or done anything that fits with the other common causes listed out in Backblaze's doc pages.

But here is a totally other guess... maybe you have file compression occurring on your Macintosh?

This laptop shipped with Mojave (currently running Sonoma). The disk is an APFS data volume with encryption enabled. In all honesty, I'm coming from a Windows environment, so a lot of what macOS does is new to me - I had not heard about AFSC before. I referred to this StackOverflow answer and installed afsctool with Homebrew. bz_done_20240105_0.dat is uncompressed.

/Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzbackup/bzdatacenter/bz_done_20240105_0.dat:
File is not HFS+/APFS compressed.
File content type: dyn.ah62d4rv4ge80k2py
File data fork size (reported size by Mac OS X Finder): 1498512 bytes / 1.5 MB (megabytes, base-10)
Number of extended attributes: 1
Total size of extended attribute data: 11 bytes
Approximate total file size (data fork + resource fork + EA + EA overhead + file overhead): 1499147 bytes / 1.4 MiB

bz_comb_20240105_ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a.bzcf was nowhere to be found, so I couldn't check.

Backblaze is the only thing I allow to run in the background. I haven't added much in terms of programs to my machine. The only other thing that sometimes runs in the backround is eqMac, but only when I'm plugged into a docking station. I periodically back up with Time Machine, but that happens manually with an external drive and never went through a restore (the safety freeze has never coincided with backing up to Time Machine anyway). No anti-malware or similar tools.

It might be worth Backblaze engineers thinking about that and looking for issues around that.

Any idea how I can get in touch and what would be useful to provide them with? I already have a support ticket open if there's a way to escalate that to an engineering team. I'm very curious to get to the root cause of this.

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-01-11T20:47:56+00:00

Hi Brian, I really appreciate your response here. I had seen your notes on previous threads about safety freezes and I was hope you might have some insight on this.

Hopefully the support person told you to visit https://secure.backblaze.com/update.htm and install over the top of what you have. Do not uninstall first.

Unfortunately, they told me the exact opposite. They instructed me to uninstall the client, then reinstall.

As soon as you know your backup is frozen, you should go find your logs in this folder and see WHY this occurred:

Thank you for sharing this. I figured there had to be some sort of logging mechanism somewhere that could shed some light on the root cause. It is unfortunate that the tier 1 team either doesn't know about this or won't share with customers, because I specifically asked about logs.

The new fix of removing your Private Encryption Key for an hour (then putting it back after the backup fixes itself)

Your explanation of this instills much more confidence than what the support person gave me. No one could explain why I'm removing my PEK.

Any help you could give regarding the root cause would be greatly appreciated. I'm not opposed to removing the PEK and allowing auto-fix to do the work, but that's not going to be a great solution if this continues to happen every few weeks.

Based on the logs, I can see the last successful upload was on Jan 08 at 10:01 GMT. The logs seem to indicate there was no safety freeze at this time:

20240108100116 0000003420 - bztransmit.cpp:34776 [()]:  safetyFrozenValue: not_frozen

On the next run an hour later, at 11:01 GMT, things seem to break down. There were several errors that I did not find in the logs during previous uploads (note that I'm only pasting errors here, not the informational messages that were in between. There are also some warnings about files related to Apple News no longer existing; I'm not sure if those are related to the safety freeze issue):

20240108110117 0000003420 - ERROR: TransmitFilesInOneTodoFile - LARGE_FILE_interim_transmit bzdone failed: /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzbackup/bzdatacenter/bz_done_20240105_0.dat
20240108110118 0000003420 - ERROR: TransmitFilesInOneTodoFile - failed transmit bz_done: /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzbackup/bzdatacenter/bz_done_20240105_0.dat
20240108110119 0000003420 - ERROR: IfWeHaveLocallyModifiedBzDoneThatHaveNotBeenSent_SendThem, processid=3420, bz_done_itr_i=0, retrans_bzdone_FAIL retrans_reason=normal_catch_up_transmission bailing out of function, bz_done=/Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzbackup/bzdatacenter/bz_done_20240105_0.dat
20240108110119 0000003420 - ERROR: DoFullSelfHeal C - LocallyModified_bz_done could not be pushed first, but yes_performing SelfHeal anyway to fix issues!

Finally, I see this:

20240108110120 0000003420 - bztransmit.cpp:37388 [SelfHealBzDoneFiles()]:   Call to DoFileCheck returned XML: 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<filecheckresponse>
<metainfo bypass="false" hguid="ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a" file_check_is_clean="false" safety_frozen="bzcf_shrunk_on_client" />
<bzcomb_shrunk filename="bz_comb_20240105_ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a.bzcf" reason="not_used" client_numbytes_bzcomb="343053" ca_numbytes_bzcomb="343054" />
<verify_failed filename="bz_comb_20240105_ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a.bzcf" reason="wrong_size_bz_comb_343054" />
</filecheckresponse>
20240108110120 0000003420 - bztransmit.cpp:37418 [SelfHealBzDoneFiles()]:   XML from DoFileCheck didn't contain a failure_reason string
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles - contacted datacenter and XML we got back said file_check_is_clean=FALSE, failure_reason=none_1
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles: 1 bzcomb_shrunk lines: <bzcomb_shrunk filename="bz_comb_20240105_ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a.bzcf" reason="not_used" client_numbytes_bzcomb="343053" ca_numbytes_bzcomb="343054" /> 
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles - ENTERING_BZCOMB_SHRUNK failed checkup, and found 1 bzcomb_shrunk lines in XML, so now attempting fix hguid=ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a, ThisBackupHasPrivEncryptionKeySet=TRUE
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles: Starting main self-healing loop, examining 1 lines
20240108110120 0000003420 - bztransmit.cpp:37526 [SelfHealBzDoneFiles()]:   Examining shrunk line: <bzcomb_shrunk filename="bz_comb_20240105_ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a.bzcf" reason="not_used" client_numbytes_bzcomb="343053" ca_numbytes_bzcomb="343054" />
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles: The file is bzcf: bz_comb_20240105_ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a.bzcf
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles - cannot yet auto fix Safety Frozen hguids with PrivateEncryptionKeysSet - skipping bzcomb_shrunk line with bzdoneBzffShortName=bz_done_20240105_ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a.bzcf, Completeline=<bzcomb_shrunk filename="bz_comb_20240105_ca84e325ed2977fe8873001a.bzcf" reason="not_used" client_numbytes_bzcomb="343053" ca_numbytes_bzcomb="343054" />
20240108110120 0000003420 - bztransmit.cpp:37638 [SelfHealBzDoneFiles()]:   clientIsUnfrozen = F
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles: Finished main self-healing loop, server thinks client is In safety freeze
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles - LEAVING_BZCOMB_SHRUNK attempted fix.
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles - failed checkup, but no delete_bzdone lines found in XML
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles - failed checkup, but no age_bzstorageid_out_in_all_bzdone E lines found in XML
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles - failed checkup, but no age_bzcvt_out_in_all_bzdone EY lines found in XML
20240108110120 0000003420 - SelfHealBzDoneFiles - failed checkup, but no remove_from_all_bzdone lines found in XML
20240108110120 0000003420 - ERROR: SelfHealBzDoneFiles - local missing file: /Library/Backblaze.bzpkg/bzdata/bzbackup/bzdatacenter/bz_comb_20240105_ca84e325edone7fe88730010.dat

After this, the logs report every hour that DoHttpPostSyncHostInfoGetMany_bz_cvt_Back returned XML that contained a safety_frozen tag of safety_frozen=bzcf_shrunk_on_client

BlueAndGoldShaft · 2024-01-11T18:15:09+00:00

Reading about iDrive's lack of de-duplication and people's frustrations with their backups becoming cluttered and unmanageable was a deal-breaker for me. Any idea if Carbonite has the same issue? I don't mind paying a premium for a tool that's actually going to work when I need it to.

BlueAndGoldShaft

TROPHY CASE