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So, you live here: Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Wait, sorry, what’s that?
You don’t live in Cape Girardeau, Missouri?
Well, look, every detail of this imaginary anecdote is absolutely essential to my explanation
of how corrupt flight planning works, so you’re going to have to suck it up and pretend like
you live in Cape Girardeau, Missouri for the next six minutes.
Great.
Now, you’ve been sitting in your home in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, cruising the web
for gluten-intolerant bachelorettes on glutenfreesingles.com, but because of your highly specific dating
preferences, and also because of your weird haircut and beady little eyes, you had to
increase your search range 600 miles to include most of Kansas.
Finally, after months, you get a match who lives here, in Dodge City, and it’s love
at first sight!
You book the very next flight to see her, but to your dismay, you’re actually flown
up here, to Chicago, and then all the way over here, to Denver, before then, finally,
to Dodge City.
Two layovers and sixteen hours later, you’re utterly disheveled, smelly, and totally unprepared
for your hot date at the local Cracker Barrel.
“Why!?” you ask, shaking your crusty fist at the sky.
“Why couldn’t they have just flown me directly to Dodge City?”
Well, really, because of math, niche flight routes—like your romantic journey between
Cape Girardeau and Dodge City—don’t attract enough passengers to recoup these costs.
They just don't make sense for airlines.
That is, of course, unless the route can carry one very special passenger instead.
Enter this guy: David Samson.
If you’re really into New Jersey politics for some reason, you might remember him as
the disgraced Chairman of the Port Authority and owner of a Wikipedia page that is about
70% “Controversies.”
Now, though you could guess this just by looking at him, Samson has a tacky polo-themed vacation
home here, in Aiken, South Carolina.
This little getaway is only 30 minutes from the Columbia Metropolitan Airport, but Samson’s
local airport in Newark, New Jersey would only fly him to Charlotte Douglas International
Airport, an agonizing 2 hours from his creepy horse mansion in Aiken.
So, like any sufficiently corrupt politician, Samson struck a deal with United Airlines’
CEO, Jeff Smisek.
I mean, technically he probably didn’t strike a deal.
Technically he complained, during a dinner together, that it took too long to get to
his vacation house directly after Jeff Smisek complained that they needed funding to extend
the subway to Newark, in order to make United’s hub airport easier to reach for passengers.
Coincidently enough, soon after, United added a flight from Newark International Airport
to Columbia exactly once a week leaving on Thursday evenings and returning on Monday
mornings, which would shave a cool 90 minutes off of Samson’s trip and allow for effortless
three-day weekends.
Also coincidently enough, the Port Authority granted funding to extend the subway.
Isn’t that a happy little coincidence?
Well, as it turns out, there weren’t very many other people in Newark who had multi-million
dollar equestrian-flavored country homes in Aiken, South Carolina that needed to fly there
every Thursday night, and even fewer folks in Aiken who wanted to go to Newark on a Monday
morning for any reason whatsoever.
I mean, the fact that anyone ever wants to fly to Newark airport is baffling enough.
So, as anyone could’ve predicted, Samson’s flight ended up in the bottom 3% of all commercial
air routes in the US, transporting around 25 passengers on a good day, which is frankly
even fewer than could fit comfortably in a mid-sized clown car.
Flying all these empty flights to and from South Carolina meant that United was hemorrhaging
an average of $10,000 a week, taking up valuable flight slots in Newark, and uselessly burning
around 3,000 gallons of jet fuel for every round trip.
Nowadays, of course, jet fuel is so cheap that I use it to sprinkler my lawn, but back
then it was worth something.
But, in Samson’s defense, all that waste gave him three hours more vacation time per
weekend—I mean, imagine how many more horses you could stare at with all that extra time!
Can you really say that you wouldn’t bribe a billionaire airline CEO and disrupt two
entire airports’ flight schedules to stare at all those extra horses?
You wouldn’t?
Well I guess that’s why you’re not the Chairman of the Port Authority, then.
Now, to Samson’s dismay, it turns out United was really only interested in keeping up this
money-burning journey to his charmless polo palace as long as he was in New Jersey’s
pocket, so when he resigned in 2014 following a completely separate abuse of power scandal,
United stopped the flights just 3 days later.
As for Smisek, well, if the flight crew who had to fly this empty ghost plane between
Newark and Columbia didn’t realize something sketchy was going on, the federal government
certainly did, and he was pinned at the center of an investigation the following year.
Fortunately, our judicial system is built to bring law-breaking billionaires to swift
and uncompromising justice, and Smisek was… oh, well, he wasn’t charged with anything,
but he was kicked to the curb with a paltry 5 million dollars in cash, several million
dollars more in United shares, and free first-class flights with complimentary airport parking
for the rest of his life!
Well, you know the saying: crime doesn’t pay, unless that payment is in the form of
vested stock options and a lifetime worth of valuable corporate perks.
Now, the first step in the process of bribing United Airlines to create a twice-weekly route
just for you is to start climbing the corporate ladder, but to do so, you need the smarts.
For many jobs, skills such as a grasp of Excel and Powerpoint have long been important, but
nowadays, it’s also often expected that you have a basic grasp of computer science.
Now, I know as a beginner you might wonder how all this computery mumbo jumbo allows
you to do things like play Animal Crossing, but like any complex skill, the first step
for anyone to understand is learning the basics.
Computer science is not super intuitive, but Brilliant breaks it down into intuitive chunks,
and that’s why they’re so effective at teaching big scary subjects.
So, if you want to become an expert in big scary STEM subjects, start with the intuitive
chunks.
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