Ask the pilot

Note to self: Never, ever underestimate the public's hatred for the airlines!

By Patrick Smith

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

March 2, 2007 | The response to my column on the art and science of weather delays was swift, brutal and all but unanimous. Not since my defense of the word "stewardess" a couple of weeks earlier had I been so relentlessly pummeled. By Sunday, readers had posted close to 200 letters, united in angry disagreement with my failure to endorse a federally mandated "Passenger Bill of Rights" as a way of avoiding incidents like the one that recently left thousands of JetBlue customers stranded aboard aircraft for up to 10 hours.

Taken together, the sentiment was blunt and overwhelming. Separately, those readers who weren't openly hostile, sarcastic and foulmouthed were able to offer a cogent and persuasive argument that, in the end, has forced me to reconsider. Suffice it to say, the Passengers Have Spoken. But before I formally raise the white flag, let me reiterate a few points. Scanning the feedback, I'm perplexed by the number of people who seem to believe that I don't sympathize with the plight of stranded travelers. Upon reaching a sort of critical mass, the letters seem to draw more from each other than from anything posed in the original column.

Not once, anywhere, did I maintain that it's acceptable practice for an airline to hold people on a plane against their will, subjecting them to a lack of food and overflowing toilets. I never thought that, I never said that, I never wrote that. Opposition to the proposed regulation is not, by default, an endorsement of pain and suffering, as dozens of posted opinions seem to have it. This thinking is along the same lines as reading one's opposition to the Iraq war as "not supporting the troops" sent to fight it. Bollocks to that. Airline delays are complex and fickle -- the types of situations that don't respond well to regulation based on arbitrary time limits. Such rules, somewhat analogous to the mandatory sentencing guidelines so despised by many judges and public defenders, tend to cause more problems than they solve.

And if I may pout for a moment: Explaining the guts of airline operations is not easy, and few voices in media do it with any degree of accuracy or savvy. Am I really a "know-it-all" and "pedantic" for trying? And while accusations that I'm a closet conservative were easy to laugh off, the same can't be said for those calling me "elitist" ("elitist prick" was the exact phrasing) and out of touch. "Leave it to an airline pilot to be completely out of touch," wrote somebody named Veronica. "No surprise, I guess. They do breathe that rarefied air of those who work under 100 work hours per month, get paid up to approximately $150,000 a year, can have two careers if they like ... or spend the rest of their time off figuring out how they'll spend their investment earnings."

Who exactly needs the reality check? Before continuing, I invite Veronica, and anyone else who still harbors such ridiculous presumptions about the lives and incomes of pilots, to read here, here or here.

I guess you don't need to be rich to be "an elitist prick," but trust me, there's not a whole lot of rarefied air around here, and not much investing going on when a pilot's lifetime career earnings can be itemized as follows:

1990: $12,000
1991: $17,000
1992: $22,000
1993: $36,000
1994: Laid off
1995: $14,000
1996: Laid off
1997: Laid off
1998: $24,000
1999: $40,000
2000: $50,000
2001: $59,000
2002: Laid off
2003: Laid off
2004: Laid off
2005: Laid off
2006: Laid off

Is that too much of a temper tantrum? Too much information? Let me guess, I'm "asking for pity" and expecting the audience to "feel bad." Get those letters coming.

Then there's the outrage over my analogies: "Let me ask you this," I had written. "Is the call center at my bank obligated under federal law to answer its phones in a certain amount of time? When UPS delivers a package late, is it beholden by an act of Congress to make amends?"

That had readers and bloggers going ballistic. In hindsight those were terrible examples, but the intended point was only that it sets a bad precedent once you begin legislating customer service -- and those are examples of customer service. Obviously -- or maybe not -- I don't equate being put on hold or receiving a tardy package with being locked in a plane all day. I wrongly assumed readers would see past the raw mechanics of the comparison.

There comes a threshold, I freely admit, when a prolonged delay is no longer a customer service issue at all, but rather one of health, safety and basic civility. The trouble is, the "Bill of Rights" proposals I've seen address more than just delays, targeting things like overbooking and lost luggage and the timeliness of announcements. If they stuck to the core issue, rather than initiating a free-for-all against everything people don't like about airlines, I'd be more sympathetic to signing on.

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