Rotundus.com

With Calgary's "Airport Improvement" Fee getting hiked to $25/flight, I figured I'd quickly run some numbers on what you already pay directly through your airline to the airport.

Some simple assumptions: costs for things like airport U.S. pre-clearance ($4/person) would already be broken out on your ticket so I'm not including that. As an example I'll be using a Westjet 737-700 at average utilization (roughly 80% ... this means 136*0.8=108.8 passengers on average). Westjet's fleet utilization average 11.6 hours per day of flight time per aircraft (at least in Q2 2010) and average stage length was about 900-950 miles, so I'll guess a little and put average flight length at 2 hours... say 6 flights per day per aircraft.

What fees have you probably not seen broken down before (using the pre-increase-to-$25-AIF list of fees for YYC):

• CUTE FEE: $0.40 per departing enplaned revenue passenger at Calgary International for the use by the air carrier of the Authority’s Common Use Terminal Equipment System (“CUTE”).
• Landing fee: Paid based on the maximum takeoff weight of an aircraft. A 737-700's MTOW is 60,330kg = $359.57 (given the passenger assumptions this works out to $3.30/person)
• General terminal fees: $3.84/person given the size of the aircraft and assuming a domestic flight. (This ranges from $2.81-$9.43/passenger depending on size of aircraft and international vs. domestic).
• Passenger loading bridge fees: $78.47 per connection to Authority owned passenger loading bridges with GPU (which is I believe the type Westjet hooks to). Per passenger: $0.72
• Apron usage fee: (basically parking for longer than a given interval per flight. Here I'll assume that each aircraft incurrs this once per day. For a Boeing 737-700 this is $66.37/occurance. Per passenger: $66.37/(6 flights on average per day * 108.8 passengers) = $0.58
• Airport improvement fee

So, prior to paying any sort of "Airport Improvement" fee, you're already forking out close to $9 in airport fees (about $12.5 if the flight had been international and $16.5 if you were pre-clearing to the US).

(For comparison, the cost to add another runway and built a new international terminal is somewhere in the $2.4 billion range. YYC argues that about $7/passenger is what they have to pay in federal taxes).

I'm feeling a little conflicted in my views about this story.

First off, the article states that "There are about 800,000 Canadians who are visually impaired". Seems a little bit high, unless you're basically looking at just the elderly as the definition doesn't appear to include those whose vision can be fixed up with glasses (like me). If talking about the elderly, would that explain why they might not be accessing stuff such as job banks quite as often?

On one hand, you've got the government's argument in court:

... that federal services are available in other ways, such as on the telephone, in person and by mail and that it is unlikely that the Internet can be perfectly accessible to all, given that there are more than 23 million pages under the domain of gc.ca

How many alternative means do you need to access the same information? Would you be able to access the same information more quickly and effectively using the phone (although I'm guessing you might be restricted to accessing it during business hours)? Similarly the article notes that "international reports on online accessibility give conflicting opinions on how Canada rates on the international scale," and notes that "the government, in 2007, updated its standards so that visually impaired individuals can use screen readers to access government sites." Apparently they didn't go far enough according to this ruling.

On the other hand:

The ruling noted there are "basic accessibility problems," such as a lack of text descriptions to permit blind users to access video, and a failure to provide alternatives to several technologies, such as "flash," which cannot be decoded by many screen readers.

How commonplace are these videos? How much of the missing tags might be figured out by simply listening to the first few seconds of the video? (Although, that said, having ALT tags for things is generally a good idea). That, and flash annoys me. I do run with flashblock installed, and that doesn't seem to pose problems for the vast majority of websites. How often does this stuff crop up?

Is that the title of the song, or the suggested response? Who comes up with this stuff? Sometimes it's hard to tell what's a parody and what's not. Not quite sure if the above or this is sillier.

The Oatmeal: Why I don't cook at home

I still do try to cook at home - although I'm never quite sure if it's completely worth the effort for a bachelor given the relatively small quantity of food needed. (Yay for large crockpots, single-single-portion-sized storage containers, and freezers). Definitely understand where this is coming from though.

Where Are The Female Balloons On Thanksgiving?

"Currently there are an abundance of female cartoon characters gracing the small screen, from cable shows to network TV to PBS. But one place you won't really be seeing them is during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade." - Yeesh. What is there that won't be protested?

A Thanksgiving Message to All 57 States

After mistakingly calling North Korea an American ally, Sarah Palin fires back by listing off a few of Obama's mistakes. Making mistakes isn't limited to a single political party.

Pensioner loses £80k life savings after driving off with it on car roof

Maybe he'll be slightly less distrusting of banks now.