American Airlines started boarding most domestic flights 5 minutes earlier this month. Earlier boarding is already standard at competitors Delta. And it’s an abomination.

I did it a couple of times with American this week. It’s ‘only 5 minutes’ but every minute counts in your life. What are you wasting your life for?

• On a connecting itinerary, it’s 20 minutes roundtrip
  
• For someone who does that weekly, that’s more than 17 hours a year. It’s an entire day of waking hours.

The airlines are costing a day a year of life just for their best customers by being less efficient, when the whole idea of air travel is to be efficient. Instead of fixing boarding to be faster, American Airlines gave up and matched the failure of forcing customers to sit on planes longer like United and Delta.

Flight delays get a lot of attention. There’s also air traffic control which creates congestion – it isn’t just responsible for delays but also for longer flight times that get built into schedules. We don’t talk enough about that.

But built-in inefficiencies and time-wasters are something we don’t talk about at all. How is it possible that people are being told to show up at the airport 2.5 to 3 hours before their flight, and that isn’t considered a failure of massive proportions?

Showing up at the airport as early as airlines advise is costing the economy $79 billion a year. That’s a massive failure.

The lengthened times for showing up at the airport mean that it no longer even makes sense for many people to take shorter flights. The time it takes to get through security, make it through the airport, and board planes earlier and earlier is wasted time.

Instead of getting more efficient, we’re queuing more and wasting precious time. And that doesn’t even count the time spent waiting at baggage claim or busing to rideshare and rental car lots at the other end of the journey.

Air travel is supposed to be about making it from one place to another as quickly as possible. It seems as though we’ve forgotten this.

Making customers show up earlier, and board earlier is a way to force customers to accommodate failed systems and failed operations. It locks in a status quo of failure.

And by the way, when JSX began offering travel from private terminals where you show up just 20 minutes in advance even with checked bags, American Airlines and Southwest lobbied the government to block it instead of embracing what’s possible for customers.

More and smaller airports are needed. Streamlined security, that doesn’t wait for nationwide universal rollout, is needed. We need runways and taxiways and air traffic capacity to increase throughput without stacking delays. Most of all, we need to avoid complacency that accepts the status quo as given.