Airlines are a favorite punching bag. The old Allegheny Airlines Inc. was known among many passengers as Agony Air. When it changed its name to US Airways Inc. (www.usair.com), it soon was dubbed Useless Air. United Air Lines Inc. (www.united.com) faces a lively protest site called Untied.com, and many other airlines have customers who love to tell horror stories. The problem has, if anything, worsened in recent years following lengthy, systemwide flight delays in 1999 and 2000, then the snarls caused by increased security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Now many airlines are using information technology to take the edge off the discomforts that passengers face. Airlines are trying to speed people through airports, warn them hours in advance about flight cancellations, reduce the loss of luggage, and keep people at the gate better informed about delays and the possibility of receiving an upgrade or a standby seat. If your frequent-flier status is high enough, gate agents even may be alerted that you are on a flight arriving late and may hold your connecting flight for a few minutes.

“All the airlines are wondering how they can better serve business travelers and even leisure travelers who are comfortable with technology,” says Forrester Research Inc. analyst Henry Harteveldt (www.forrester.com).

To help speed people through airports, airlines are rolling out self-service check-in kiosks. By increasing the number of places where people can check in, the kiosks diminish or even eliminate lines. The kiosks also generally take less time than the person behind the airline counter. US Airways says checking in at a kiosk generally takes 2½ minutes, while checking in at a counter takes an average of a minute longer. Northwest Airlines Inc. (www.nwa.com) reports even greater savings: It says kiosks take less than half as long as checking in with an agent—not counting the savings that come from not waiting in a line.

When Harteveldt recently used a kiosk to check in at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, it took him no more than 45 seconds, including answering security questions and seeing if he could change seats. “I didn’t have to talk to a check-in agent. I didn’t have to talk to a skycap. I didn’t need to speak to anyone,” he says.

Delta Air Lines Inc. (www.delta.com), Alaska Airlines (www.alaskaair.com), and Northwest Airlines even offer check-in over the Internet, which means passengers can head straight through security to the gate. “We can basically convert a PC anywhere into a check-in kiosk,” Alaska Airlines spokesman Jack Evans says. Northwest reckons its Internet check-in means some 7,000 passengers spend as many as 20 fewer minutes at the airport daily.

Airlines hope to further diminish the time people spend hanging around airports by building systems that automatically notify passengers when a flight is significantly delayed or canceled. The systems can reach people through any means they like, whether by cellphone, land-line phone, personal digital assistant, or fax.

The technology isn’t always reliable, just yet, so the computer-generated messages don’t always reach passengers. In addition, only United currently makes registration simple enough that passengers can just register once and be notified about any flight they take from then on; other airlines require that passengers register each time they take a flight.

Still, airlines are reaching an awful lot of people who previously wouldn’t have known about a problem until they reached the airport. Delta, for instance, says that it has been issuing about two million notifications a month to passengers about changes in flights.

Andrew Watterson, a vice president at Mercer Management Consulting Inc. (www.mercermc.com), says the new system may have recently kept him from missing a flight. Getting off a United flight at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, he was set to dash to another terminal to make a connection. Then he received a notification on his Web-enabled cellphone telling him the flight had been moved to a gate near where he was. Rather than go to the other terminal, then double back, Watterson went straight to the gate and made his flight.

“Airlines have used technology for many years behind the scenes to improve scheduling, pricing, and keeping track of their aircraft,” Watterson says. “But it’s a relatively recent phenomenon to be pushing technology out to areas that are visible to customers.”

That push extends, very visibly, to the information posted at gates operated by some airlines. Rather than just show the flight number and expected departure time, new computer-driven monitors that gradually are being deployed nationwide answer all the common questions from passengers—including the weather at the flight’s destination, the reason for any delay, the configuration of seats, where people rank on any upgrade or standby lists, and how many spots are available. The displays even can show weather maps so antsy passengers, who often don’t feel they are getting the full story from gate agents, can see for themselves that there are thunderstorms or other trouble in the path their flight is to take.

Delta, which has been especially aggressive about rolling out the new displays, has made them part of a broader system that lets agents do much more managing of the flight. Agents now can readily see how many of the expected passengers have boarded, and just which seats are still unoccupied. Agents also can see the frequent-flier status of those who haven’t arrived. That way, if agents have to juggle seats as departure time nears, they can start by giving away the seats of those with the lowest status.

In addition, the new system flags any flights that might arrive too late for passengers to make the connection. The agent can easily check how many passengers on each arriving flight are supposed to connect to his. He can even see the frequent-flier status for each. If a slight delay would let him collect enough additional passengers—especially those with elevated frequent-flier status—he might stall a few minutes before closing the doors.

When, despite these new efforts, passengers end up cooling their heels at airports, airlines are trying to make them a little more comfortable by providing high-speed wireless access to the Internet in lounges. The effort is nascent—a wireless-industry white paper estimates that only 180 airline lounges worldwide will have the technology by the end of this year—but eventually should spread broadly.

Similarly, airlines are looking seriously at wiring jets for high-speed Internet access delivered via satellite. On a Boeing Co. aircraft outfitted with demonstration equipment, “There was one guy who was doing instant messaging with his girlfriend in New Zealand,” Boeing spokesman Terrance Scott says (www.boeing.com). He adds that an airline executive, realizing he would miss his scheduled Alaska Airlines flight, logged on to the airline’s Web site, changed flights, and printed a boarding pass—at 30,000 feet. Although the Sept. 11 attacks have slowed the initiative as carriers slash costs, Germany’s Lufthansa AG (www.lufthansa.com) is set to begin a trial of the Boeing service by early next year.

Airlines also are using technology to improve in ways that, while behind the scenes, should provide real benefits.

To reduce the number of lost bags, airlines are deploying many more bar-code scanners so that baggage handlers can scan luggage tags at each step along the way. United alone has deployed more than 3,000 hand-held scanners in the U.S. It is adding wireless capabilities to them, so its computers are updated as soon as a tag is scanned, rather than waiting until a handler returns from his work and plugs his scanner into a computer. “We have real-time information for where every bag is located,” United spokesman Joe Hopkins says. “If a bag doesn’t show up where it’s supposed to, it’s easier to work backward to locate the bag and reunite it with the customer.” Although baggage-handling had been a growing problem for many years, United says its incidence of mishandled bags in February was at its lowest since 1984.

Although passengers may never realize it, several airlines sometimes shave travel time because their pilots are outfitted with laptops that handle the tedious calculations necessary to figure out key variables related to takeoff. Previously, pilots relied on tables in huge books—schlepped around in awkward flight bags called “brain bags”—to figure out, say, how much thrust to apply based on factors such as the weather, the plane’s weight, and the length of the runway. Now, when a wind shift requires a change of runway, pilots at JetBlue Airways (www.jetblue.com), Southwest Airlines (www.southwest.com), and Austrian Airlines Group (www.austrianair.com), among others, can instantly recalculate all the key variables and jump to the head of the line while pilots at other airlines sit there, flipping through their manuals and using a calculator.

Technology may even help reduce turbulence experienced by passengers: Honeywell is developing a radar system that will do a better job of detecting bumps ahead of time, letting the pilot avoid them.

To be sure, technology has a long way to go before it will fully rehabilitate airlines’ reputation for poor service. That may require changes in the way airline executives think. Forrester’s Harteveldt says that, for airlines, the word “service” means “the number of flights between two points”—rather than keeping customers happy. “Flying is lousy now,” he says. “Airlines and passengers speak two different languages.”

Fillion, who recently flew across the country with his one-year-old son in tow, looks forward to the day when airlines offer disposable sippy cups, bibs, and child-safety seats so that he doesn’t need to carry everything along with him. He is a free-lance writer based in Evergreen, Colo., and can be reached at rfillion@mindspring.com.