New York: The captain is at the controls, the tray tables are stowed, and nobody is smoking in the lavatories. We’ll be taking off shortly.
But wait, what about the coffee machines – are the coffee machines ready for departure?
Airlines blame flight delays on many things – missing paperwork, storms in faraway states, planes stacked up at La Guardia – but one explanation in particular trips up some travellers. It’s the broken coffee maker in the airplane galley. “Not sure why an @AmericanAir flight has to go back to the gate because of a freakin coffee maker... that baffles me,” wrote Ryan Fahey on Twitter in February.
The miracle of human flight with onboard snacks is one of humanity’s great achievements. How is it, then, that a balky coffeepot can bring a jumbo jet to a dead halt?
It turns out to be a surprisingly complex problem to fix. An “inordinate amount of coffee maker problems” are causing short flight delays, the chief of operations for American Airlines, Robert Isom, said recently in a podcast for company employees. “If we can’t find a fix, we ought to just replace all the coffee makers.”
In the competitive airline industry, even small flight delays matter. They can cascade across the nation, affecting “hundreds, if not thousands, of passengers,” Isom said in an interview. It’s not just about the coffee, he said, it’s “the most financially sound way to run an airline.”
Isom came to American in its 2013 merger with US Airways, where he helped to achieve one of the industry’s best on-time departure records, which means taking off within 15 minutes of the scheduled time. American could use help on that score. At 83 per cent for the first three months of the year, American ranked between two of its main rivals, Delta Air Lines (86 per cent) and United Airlines (81 per cent), according to the Department of Transportation.
Isom declined to say precisely how many of American’s delays are caused by broken coffee makers. The Department of Transportation, which tracks delays, said it couldn’t provide that level of detail.
In his quest to get American’s planes off the ground on time, Isom is looking not only at coffee makers but also at other seemingly mundane delay-causing problems, such as spills on seats. Spills on cloth upholstery can delay a flight because the crew must remove the seat cushion and replace it with a dry one. Economy travellers can expect to see more “synthetic leather” seat covers, which have superior wipeability.
Onboard coffee machines are trickier. They cost anywhere from $7,000 (Dh25,705) to $20,000 apiece. And they are electrical, so if one isn’t working, the ground crew needs to make sure there’s not a problem with the circuitry that could cause a fire or other hazard.
“You can’t just put Mr Coffee in an airline,” said Jeff Lowe, president of Aviation Fabricators, a certified airplane repair station in Clinton, Mo. “You have to do all kinds of engineering and analysis and provide test results to the FAA to get approval.”
The Federal Aviation Administration requires coffee makers to have safety features like circuit breakers and wiring insulation to protect against onboard fires. So when a coffee machine misbehaves, maintenance crews must inspect it to ensure there is no risk.
Special features
Other special features include latches to ensure that the coffeepot does not shake loose during turbulence. These elaborately engineered details mean there is more that can go wrong.
Airplane safety rules try to anticipate problems because if something goes wrong midflight, there’s little room for error. For instance, even though smoking cigarettes has been banned since the 1990s, planes still must have ashtrays in the lavatories. Because if someone does smoke in there, they have a place to put the cigarette other than the trash bin, which is full of flammable paper.
When a coffee machine breaks down, often it can simply be replaced by spares kept on hand for that purpose. If that’s not possible, the plane can still take off, but only after mechanics disable the coffee machine by turning the water off and cutting the power.
This, though, can cause a new set of problems for airlines. Passengers expect on-time departures — but they expect coffee too. “@AmericanAir- seriously no coffee on a my morning fly 5797 to ONT? Doesn’t that violate a law or something?” wrote Tim Swearingen, a technical project manager based in Phoenix, on Twitter a few days ago.
Reached by phone, Swearingen added this thought: “And why would you wait until I’m on the plane to announce that? I would have gone to Starbucks.”
Even the water is complicated in an airliner and can contribute to breakdowns. Marcos Jimenez, an engineer at Zodiac Aerospace who has developed patented coffee-maker technology, said there were two main types of machines: those that use water from an airplane’s water reservoir, and those that require a flight attendant to pour filtered, bottled water into the machine.
Most commercial airlines use machines hooked up to a water tank. “Because it’s in a tank, they have to take particular care to make sure the water is not growing bacteria and whatnot. So they treat it with chemicals, kind of like a pool,” he said.
These chemicals, along with minerals in the water, can cause residue to build up in the machinery. Clogs can cause the machine to break down, particularly if maintenance crews don’t clean them often enough, Jimenez said. “I don’t drink the coffee unless I know the water’s coming from a bottle.”
Delta and United acknowledge that coffee makers can cause trouble, though they do not seem as focused on it as American is. “We do have some delays due to coffee maker problems from time to time, but it’s not a prevalent cause,” said Jonathan Guerin, a United spokesman. He noted, however, that United’s maintenance crews recently increased the frequency of checks on coffee makers specifically to reduce delays.
American is working with B/E Aerospace, a manufacturer of aircraft cabin products, to replace malfunctioning coffee makers on many of its planes, at thousands of dollars each. American’s Boeing 737s, which make up about a third of its fleet, typically have four of the machines on board. Larger planes like the Boeing 777, which usually flies international routes, may have more than a dozen coffee makers.
If the overhaul is effective, it might cut down on the number of complaints from passengers like Darren McGrady.
McGrady, a personal chef based in Dallas according to his Twitter bio, boarded a 6:45 am flight in April, only to find his departure delayed by a broken coffee maker. He complained about that on Twitter, and American’s corporate account replied: “We’ll get the coffee maker up and running so we can have you on your way!”
Swarm of technicians
A few minutes later, McGrady tweeted again, this time with a photo of an empty galley – no mechanics in sight. “I can see technicians swarming around the coffee machine trying to fix it,” he wrote.
American followed up: “It’s all set now! You’ll be wheels up soon.”
“You can sit and wait on an airplane for the dumbest things,” said Lowe at Aviation Fabricators. But he takes a philosophical view.
“They have to wait for some guy in maintenance to say, ‘It’s OK,’” Lowe said. “And frankly, that’s probably the way it ought to be.”
