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Lies, Urban Myths and Airport Standard Time
The Travel Technologist · January 18, 2001

Can technology lie? If you travel, you bet.

Two recent reports that airport clocks had been set up to ten minutes faster in order to corral passengers to their departure gate early made that abundantly clear. In the wrong hands, even seemingly incorruptible technology can be manipulated to mislead us.

"It has been common knowledge that all the clocks in the terminals at Chicago O'Hare are set 10 minutes fast, to speed travelers to their gates a little earlier," says Carl Levitt, a traveler from the Windy City.

Reader Joel Berman also reports that "in their zeal to planes out on time" the clocks in Boston run faster - particularly at the Northwest Airlines terminal.

Before we get to the question of whether these allegations are true or not, a little history. Both the airline industry and the Federal Aviation Administration are more than a little concerned about the pathetic on-time record of the major carriers, each for its own pathetic reasons. The airlines are embarrassed every month when the United States Department of Transportation divulges their punctuality stats, and the FAA is left red-faced when the industry accuses it of promoting gridlock in the skies with its backward policies.

The point I'm making is this: everyone's got a reason to lie.

But are they?

Absolutely not, the two airports accused of this treacherous time warp say. A spokeswoman from Logan categorically denied the clock story. "I'm sitting here in my office, looking at one of our clocks right now, and I can tell you that it's running on time," she said emphatically.

"It's not true," responded Monique Bond, spokeswoman for Chicago O'Hare, when asked about the Dali-esque timepieces in her terminals. "We retain the same consistent time throughout our airport. We're set by the same [method] that the FAA uses to set the clocks in the control towers, so no, we're not turning our clocks ahead."

I want to believe the airports. But something's still not right. I have the feeling that someone's lying.

Here's one possible answer. While the airport authority usually controls the big clocks in its terminals, it usually has no say-so when it comes to the digital displays at the gates. The carriers set them. Could it be that those timers are being advanced prematurely? I asked Northwest Airlines, the airline that stands accused of misleading its passengers in Boston, to comment.

"No, absolutely not," says Doug Killian, a spokesman for the Minneapolis airline. "We're not going to mislead people. We certainly want to take off on time, but we wouldn't resort to setting the clocks ahead to do it."

So where does that leave us? Well, first of all, this doesn't mean that my sources are wrong. Until I can personally check every clock on every wall in every terminal, I'm not going to question the reliability of my sources. I'm more inclined to believe that this form of time-mismanagement occurs in airports where gate agents get a little overzealous. Perhaps it doesn't happen as often as my readers would believe, but I think it does happen.

I base my conclusions on insider knowledge of how the gate operations work. (A disclaimer: I'm not a gate agent, nor have I ever been one.) Airline employees working the gate are under a tremendous amount of pressure to get the flight boarded. I know because I am related to one. The war stories I hear are always the same - an overworked ground crew fighting against the clock to process hundreds of passengers.

Wouldn't it make sense if gate agents could buy a little extra time? Here' s where my insider knowledge runs out and the speculation starts. Since I' m not intimately familiar with each digital display, I can't say whether it's possible to reset the time at the gate. Only that if it's happening, that's the first place where I would look.

It's not that much of a stretch. After all, we already disbelieve most of the other information on the digital display at the gate, especially when it comes to delays. When's the last time a delayed flight actually left when the board promised it would, instead of being subject to countless upward revisions - the notorious "creeping" delay?

All of which brings us back to the issue of trust and technology. If we can't believe something as straightforward as a timepiece, what else should we be skeptical of? A fare we found on an airline site? An electronic ticket? A contract for cellular phone service? A warranty for a personal digital assistant, a laptop or a pager?

While this vast conspiracy to change our clocks from Eastern Standard Time to Airport Standard Time may be nothing more than an urban myth, the fears they underline are not. If you can't rely on a clock, what can you rely on?

In this upside-down world where technology is often little more than ammunition in a battle to widen profit margins, the answer, sadly, is not much.

> Listen to Elliott's audio commentary.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Annapolis, Md. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. The Travel Technologist appears weekly on this site. This story was also published on Biztravel.com.