Today I’m writing from an airplane. I’m headed to Vancouver for work, and I have the distinct pleasure of being routed from Philadelphia, over Dallas, and into Salt Lake City before going on to Vancouver. The geography of that route doesn’t really make any sense at all, but it has been dictated to us by the density of flights in the skies over the Midwest, and the massive storm front in that area as well. As it happens, our fun little detour has necessitated a stop in Salt Lake City for more fuel before continuing on our “direct” flight from Philadelphia to Vancouver.
Unless you’ve been living on the moon recently, regularly avoiding the news, you are likely aware that airlines are all in a mode of nickel and diming their customers to the nth degree, because they simply can’t make money. I suppose for the average beleaguered traveler, it’s one point of consolation that even through all of the crappy treatment, the airline still isn’t turning a buck. Between the costs of funding their worker’s retirements, and the cost of gasoline, they’re losing money even when they manage to pry $25 out of you for that extra bag.
The benefits that airlines provide to their customers in the form of frequent flier miles don’t get their customers anywhere; due to the fact that most planes are full these days, upgrades purchased with frequent flier miles don’t work, because there aren’t any available seats to use for the upgrade. The same problem blocks customers from using frequent flier miles for free flights. Those free tickets are typically only available these days on certain rare routes, and only when the airplane wouldn’t otherwise be full. In short, your demonstrated loyalty to an airline in the form of frequent flier miles might buy you the right to fly standby on an unpopular route at an inconvenient time. If you’re lucky.
Air travel problems don’t stop there though. There is a widely acknowledged problem with the growth and scalability of the US national air travel industry. Simply put, there are more delays these days because there are too many airplanes clogging the skies. FAA regulations require a certain “separation” between airplanes for safety. You don’t want one airplane landing too closely after another, or there can be trouble with timing and coordination. Further, the military often helps itself to large blocks of the civilian airspace, blocking it off for training exercises. This in turn requires all of the airlines to fly around those blocks of space. Resulting in…you guessed it, more gas burned and late arrivals. The FAA is taking part of a huge project called “NextGen”, which is an attempt to envision the next-generation air traffic control space in the US. Ultimately, this mastodon of a federal bureaucratic project will collapse under its own weight, but the need for airspace improvements is legitimate and pressing.
And then there’s the security. The TSA continues to keep us very safe from a wide array of hallucinated threats, as well as keeping us somewhat safe from a handful of serious threats. When I go through the security lines and stare into the dead eyes of some of these poor souls who have been inspecting thousands of strangers per hour, I pity them. If I were in their shoes, (and really I could be, since when I’m in their presence I’m not in my own shoes) I would probably be just as annoyed by the testy business travelers and the morons who can’t follow simple verbal instructions when repeated 10 times.
How does this entire situation come to pass? We’re talking about the preferred mode of distance travel in a major industrialized nation, and the setup we’ve created for ourselves is one where a service in heavy demand isn’t profitable, and is widely loathed by its customers. You would think that in a business that had the sex appeal and romanticism of the open skies, airlines would be able to come up with something.
They say that in most markets, after you strip away the many layers of so-called rationality, you’re left with market psychology, that of fear and greed. Perhaps that idea is in play here too. Air travelers are fearful, in that we allow the TSA to foist ridiculous security onto us in exchange for vague promises that we will be safer from the bogeymen. (Which threats have they protected us against recently? Well, they’re so scary, they’re classified). And let’s not forget greed, or rather its bastard cousin, stinginess. Air travelers simply aren’t willing to pay for a standard of service better than what they’re currently getting in ballast class travel. If what we pay doesn’t even cover the snack box on the flight anymore, and we’re not willing to chip in a couple extra bucks to cover the gas, we have to expect to be nickel and dimed. The alternative is to expect that airlines will simply start losing money for the fun of it, a prospect that to me seems even less likely than some of the TSA’s more disturbing dreams.
