Hurry up and wait
According to an article I came across yesterday, U.S. flight delays are at the highest level they’ve been in at least 13 years. I could’ve told you that — I pretty much expect some sort of delay while flying these days. I’m surprised if a flight is actually on time. I was listening to Slate magazine’s daily podcast yesterday morning, and the subject was (again) air travel. Apparently, even though flight delays, bumped passengers, and lost luggage are at an all-time high, the airlines are doing better financially since the economic beating they took post-9/11.
So why are we, as air travelers, putting up with this crap? Daniel Gross’ article on Slate puts it eloquently:
What explains this dichotomy? After all, if workers at a restaurant chain routinely spat in customers’ food, took three hours to deliver an appetizer, lost checked coats, and, every so often, grabbed diners by the lapels and kicked them out the door, the chain would quickly go bust.
This Tale of Two Airline Industries can be explained by a few basic macroeconomic factors and by one highly unexpected microeconomic development—airline managers are doing a much better job running their unwieldy empires.
Customers cut airlines slack in part because they can blame other forces for their misery. The Federal Aviation Administration’s creaky, vintage system causes many delays. The Transportation Security Administration oversees the Soviet-like security lines. Weather-related problems can be attributed to a higher power.
The overwhelming majority of Americans lack an efficient alternative to the unfriendly skies. Even if a six-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles turns into an 11-hour Hieronymus Bosch-like ordeal, it’s still light-years faster than a cross-country train or car ride. For all the hype surrounding corporate jets and the advent of air-taxi services, they constitute only a tiny sliver of the market.
Meanwhile, five-plus years of economic growth has boosted demand. Between April 2003 and April 2007, the number of domestic passengers rose 21 percent—while the number of flights rose only 4 percent.
I’ll be the first to admit it: air travel is generally lousy. I’ve dealt with missed connections, lost luggage, ridiculously long security lines, and abysmal customer service more times than I would care to count. I actually lobbed an f-bomb at a bitchy USAirways employee not too long ago because she was being such an unhelpful twat, and I’m generally a pretty mild-mannered person. It takes a lot to rile me up, but when I get riled, look out.
So how do we deal with all of these air-related annoyances? Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some lessons I’ve learned during my sojourns through the not-so-friendly-skies. Some of them I learned the hard way, so I figure by posting them here I can spare some of you the same difficulties in the future.
Stay tuned!
