Inflate Gate: The Frequent Flyer Program for Educational Researchers

Abstract

We are finally relieved about no longer hearing the daily conversations about Tom Brady’s involvement in the use of supposedly under inflated footballs used in the American Football Conference Championship game between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. For those of you who couldn’t care less about professional football in the United States, someone in the Patriot’s organization supposedly underinflated footballs (below the league’s guidelines). These footballs were used by the Patriots and purportedly provided them an advantage with respect to passing and catching the football. This controversy was referred as ‘‘deflate gate’’ by the popular press. This whole situation reminded us of a similar situation in the airline industry. While similar, the situation is actually opposite because it involves inflation rather than deflation. As professional science teacher educators, most of us travel moderately or extensively to professional meetings and other professional activities. The longer one is in the profession it seems the travel becomes more extensive. In any case, the various airlines have well-established frequent flyer mileage programs that allow travelers to accumulate miles based on the miles they have flown. When we were young, these programs were fairly simple, and there was a one to one correspondence between miles flown and frequent flyer miles accumulated. After enough miles were accumulated (usually 20,000), the traveler was awarded a free ticket for a domestic flight. In recent years, competition among the airlines for paying passengers, and ingenious ways to improve profits for airlines, has manifested into complicated programs that take into account miles flown, cost of tickets, etc. Of interest here are the various ways one can accumulate miles without