Airline Improvement Suggestion

The other day my friend Michelle was talking about a flight she took with her family earlier this year. They had to make a connection in Atlanta and go from terminal A to terminal F. Their first flight arrived late and they bolted to the next gate to find out that their plane was still there, but the gate agent had given their seats away and rebooked them into middle seats. It was infuriating since they made the flight and those standby passengers could have been given those middle seats.
Today I got a notice that something I had ordered had been shipped and I went to the tracking page and was able to see exactly where my package is now and when it will be delivered to my house. Seems to me that airlines could get a lot more customer satisfaction, something they could use right now, if they would treat connecting passengers like packages and track them. 
The information already exists to know if a person boarded a plane, if that plane landed and which gate it landed at. All the airlines need to do is create algorithms that say how long it takes the average passenger to walk from one gate to the next. They could improve the accuracy if they also included where on the first plane someone was sitting so they could judge how long it might take them to deplane. Throw in an extra three minute for a bathroom stop and the gate agents at the second leg should be able to know if connecting passengers are going to make a flight or not.  
Let’s add some more improvements. If there are twenty people trying to connect and they are going to hold the departure of the plane up by five minutes isn’t that worth doing because the system could tell the gate agent that there are not 20 free seats on the next flight. The information exists, but it is not being utilized to make smart, customer friendly decisions.
Today airlines have built in so much fat in the flying times so that they can make on time arrivals we should stop caring about on time departures. Who cares if you take off on time as long as you arrive on time.
It seems ridiculous that packages are treated better than people. Hey every airline out there– hire some UPS data analysis people and take better care of your passengers.