The second of our featured letters, meanwhile, is just plain belligerent. I have to ask, do people send messages like this to their doctors because the healthcare system happens to be screwed up? The next time the author goes to the hospital for a serious operation, I recommend he first send a note to his surgeon saying more or less what he said to me. Would he be comfortable with that, going under the knife? He doesn't seem to care that he could someday be a passenger on one of my flights. Depressingly, it will be my duty to save his ass should an engine explode at 160 knots on the runway.
As for what started all of this -- my suggestion that passengers take flying for granted -- I am not backing down. I cannot dispute that, on the whole, airlines flop miserably when it comes to customer service (more on that in a minute). However, if you think there is some terrible injustice in being asked to pay, say, $1,000 to fly halfway around the world, at 600 miles per hour, in a $200 million airplane, in almost absolute safety, you're being unreasonable.
Airline tickets cost roughly what they cost 25 years ago. We've gotten used to being able to travel on the cheap, reacting with shrieks any time fares tick upward. Alas, thanks mostly to skyrocketing petroleum prices, reality has caught up with the giddy fantasy spawned by deregulation. Fuel costs have risen tenfold since 1980 to become an airline's largest single expenditure -- eclipsing the costs of labor (long ago trimmed to the bone), aircraft leases and everything else. Economies of scale and advanced aircraft engines mean that flying will always be somewhat cheaper than it used to be, but the basics haven't changed. Even at maximum economy (airplanes, unlike cars, are remarkably efficient on a gallons-per-person basis), it still takes large amounts of fuel to move large numbers of people over large distances, using very expensive equipment. Flying will be getting more expensive. It has to.
But do I expect that millions of people will suddenly come to grips with this in a flash of epiphany? No, and to some extent they can hardly be blamed. At heart, the traveling public's resentment isn't about airfares. It's about service. It's about delays, cancellations, missed connections, security lines, lost luggage, dirty planes, crying babies, and all the assorted indignities that have turned flying into an uncomfortable, tedious and occasionally miserable experience.
Low fares and good service are to some extent mutually exclusive, but nevertheless there is plenty the airlines can and should do to address these things. What has thus far kept them from doing so is less about cost than a long-established culture of apathy and inertia. Record high load factors have allowed the industry to ignore its own mistakes. Flying isn't much fun, but people keep doing it anyway.
That, however, may be changing. The House Committee on Small Business estimates that the U.S. economy will lose $26.5 billion this year as a direct result of Americans choosing not to fly. This ought to be a wake-up call.
In a column earlier this summer I proposed that 80 percent of what people hate about flying could be assuaged in two fell swoops: by reducing the number of delays/cancellations and doing something -- anything -- to fix the nonsense of airport security. At first glance it might seem as though neither of these things is within an airline's direct control, but I beg to differ.
The congestion issue, which I explored last summer, can be substantially improved through better scheduling practices, including a reduction in the number of regional planes at busy hubs during peak periods.
As for security, I fail to see how the industry can remain comfortable with things the way they are. Granted, airlines tread a fine line -- there are liability issues, and carriers caught an awful lot of flack, most of it undeserved, in the aftermath of Sept. 11 -- but at some point they need to stand up and express outrage over what most of us already know: that the bulk of the Transportation Security Administration's checkpoint screening measures are pointless and absurd. They do not make people safer; they make people angry, all the while wasting billions of dollars and immeasurable amounts of our time. (This is above and beyond various other Department of Homeland Security protocols that burden both the airline industry and its passengers -- particularly those arriving from overseas -- such as the tedious gathering of passenger data and a new fingerprint collection requirement. According to the Air Transport Association, DHS proposes to stick the industry with more than $3 billion in additional expenses over the next decade.)
A third way for carriers to help themselves is by improving their horrendous levels of customer communication. Front-line staff (crews included) need to be better trained. At a gateside podium recently I watched as a woman, who had missed final call, nearly burst into tears after the boarding door was slammed in her face and a trio of counter agents then stood there ignoring her for over 10 minutes.
Finally one of the agents replied curtly, "We paged you and you didn't answer. Now we're busy." (One of the reasons she missed the page is because four public address announcements, together with the blather of CNN Airport News, had been playing over the loudspeakers simultaneously, making it impossible to hear anything.)
On another recent occasion, I was at an airport waiting to board a flight that had posted a four-hour departure delay. Three hours into that four-hour delay, at nearly midnight, the flight was canceled. There was no apology, and the explanation was some half-assed mumbling about "the weather." The moment the cancellation was announced, the agents vanished from the counter and went home, leaving a hundred or so people sitting at the gate with nobody to rebook them.
Similar things, I know, happen all the time.
Travelers don't want to be coddled, but they do want dignity, efficiency and a modicum of comfort. For as long as they are not getting it, anti-airline sentiment will grow hotter and hotter. Already, the loathing and distrust of airlines cannot be overestimated. It is, at this point, a feeling of resentment unparalleled in American business and industry. Right or wrong, fair or unfair, people resent airlines as much or more than they resent oil companies, politicians, certain lawyers and the rest of the usual suspects. Carriers ignore this at their peril. There will come a tipping point when a critical number of people simply refuse to travel.
Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.
About the writer
Patrick Smith is an airline pilot. His column is archived here.
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