Ask the pilot

Getting the silent treatment from airlines. Why are they so bad at customer relations?

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Airplanes, Airlines, Business, Airports, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

Jan. 27, 2006 | A flight from Las Vegas is canceled because "it's too hot to fly." A crew aborts a landing because "a plane crossed in front of us." In Flagstaff, Ariz., counter staff inform a group of delayed passengers that volunteers are needed to give up their seats. When passengers ask why, they are told, "We need to lighten the load. The plane has been having problems and we're afraid one of the engines might cut out."

Those examples appeared in this space a week ago as part of a discussion on the roots of aerophobia. Millions of people, we know, are fearful fliers. This is the insurmountable result of human nature as much as anything else; all the statistics and straight talk in the world won't overcome a certain reluctance toward racing through the air in giant metal tubes filled with explosive fuel. But clearly the airlines, as lazy and ineffective communicators, have made a difficult situation worse. Time and time again, and seemingly against their best interests, they act in ways that nurture and perpetuate myths and misconceptions.

It's ironic that while travel by plane remains profoundly safe, the airlines themselves are the subject of widespread and growing distrust. The mass media does them no favors by distorting and overhyping minor events, but the industry has, for many years, been guilty of aiding and abetting people's fears through a combination of tight-lipped reticence and the use of ludicrous simplifications.

Let's take reticence first: Not long ago I received a letter from a man who'd been onboard an aircraft that suffered a compressor stall after takeoff. Compressor stalls are caused by a backup of airflow within the rotating compressor sections of a jet engine. They don't occur very often, but when they do, they tend to manifest themselves rather vividly -- through extremely loud bangs and, occasionally, tongues of flame. That's the nature of a turbine engine. Most compressor stalls are transient and harmless, though once in a while components are damaged and engines need to be shut down. Either way, people react to the noise and flames as you might expect them to -- with fright. In the letter writer's case, the stall had been potent enough that the crew returned for a precautionary landing. Passengers were shaken up; some were crying.

Once on the ground, the passengers disembarked and were hurriedly herded to a replacement plane. It was chaotic and disorganized, and virtually no explanation was provided aside from a short announcement by the crew and a vague reference to engine trouble.

Days later, the man sent the airline a formal query. With nobody offering evidence to the contrary, he wondered if he'd come close to perishing in a disaster. As he saw it, the plane's engine had practically exploded outside his window. "Is it true," he asked the airline, "the plane could have flown with a failed engine?"

The airline sent him an apologetic form letter and a hundred-dollar voucher for future travel. All well and good, except he didn't want a voucher, or even an apology. He wanted to know what had gone wrong, and how treacherous it truly was.

Why couldn't each passenger have been mailed a no-nonsense summary of what happened, describing the general innocuousness of compressor stalls, along with a reminder that all commercial airliners are certified to fly after the failure of a powerplant?

That's a fairly middle-of-the-road scenario. Take the somewhat more harrowing case of an MD-80 that burst a tire on takeoff six years ago. Shreds of the material were ingested by an engine, which proceeded to catch fire. The plane then made a full-blown emergency landing. "There was smoke in the cabin," remembers one passenger. "People prayed and cried. It was the worst and longest feeling of doom I have ever experienced."

While the emergency was very serious, if you look at it piece by piece, it wasn't the near-calamity this passenger, and dozens of others, thought it to be. But the carrier never explained how or why it happened. Again, it gave out travel vouchers and a carefully worded apology that revealed nothing.

Over the course of fielding questions through this column, I've received countless letters from passengers left mystified, scared and angry after similar instances.

Fortunately, engine fires, tongues of flame, exploding tires and the like are quite rare. But on the other hand, the bulk of anti-airline sentiment has little to do with emergencies. Airlines do most of their self-immolating in response to the thousands of small operational snafus that take place daily around the world: weather and traffic delays, cancellations, minor mechanical problems. Almost always these are complicated affairs, but airlines have perfected the art of dumbing them down -- the science of air carrier logistics reduced to preposterous caricature: It's too hot to fly.

Next page: Why don't passengers trust the airlines?