Letters to the Editor
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Missing the Forest for the Trees
For the record, I agree that the proposed bill tries to legislate too many things. And I don't think that your last column was worthy of abuse.
But I also think that you miss the point when you effectively argue that there's no point at which legislation/regulation becomes the only answer.
Your two-hour delay example could be exactly accurate. But the same argument can be used (and is used) at three hours. And four hours. And nine-and-a-half hours. Why let the passengers off now? Wheels-up time might come at any minute, after all!
The fact is, as you grudgingly concede, the "invisible hand" of the market hasn't worked, and won't work. It'll be a shame if a plane filled with passengers loses an extra hour because of the option to deplane. But, at some point, it becomes necessary.
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With all due respect
The airlines brought this anger largely on themselves. I concede to you that there are quite a few considerations that haven't gone into the Passenger's Bills of Rights ideas. But it isn't very practical to pass a "Passenger's, Employees, and Everyone Else Being Screwed by the Corporate Schmucks That Run Megabusinesses Bill of Rights." So sorry, but the crew and pilots of the airplane are the public face of a very abusive set of moguls.
Maybe the public is really calling for the airlines to be re-regulated. This is just the most colossal example of the public being sold a "deregulation is always better" bill of goods and then finding out it isn't. All of the surrounding industries have been pushing the same crap.
Or maybe the free market might work in the airlines. But not when the only two ways I'm allowed to sort my ticket options are by price and departure time, and the only other parameter I'm allowed is number of stops. Where are the web pages that allow me to pick my flight by inches of leg room, or height of the seat back (I'm taller than average), or the meal menu, or, my favorite, number of clicks above 14% on the humidity? Where are the gradations in price within a flight other than $300 and then next up $2200? Or how about creating other new choices? Discounts on ski passes if I lay over in Salt Lake City? or, or,...
or anything other than be at the airport in the dead of night to strip down to my skivvies, stand and wait on the plane while all the privileged characters with the steamer trunk carry-ons employ one or more flight attendants to hoist their must have stuff into the bins then sit with my knees burning from being pinned against the seat in front of me where a 5'4" person has laid their seat out like a bed scrounge around for $5 in exact change to buy a sandwich if it happens to be something I can eat wait for my nose to go nuts from the dryness while the guy behind me coughs his cold or SARS or whatever on the whole plane for the same reason wait for an hour by the luggage claim my reward for being a good boy and checking my luggage then making arrangements to pick up my baggage the next day -- all assuming that I made my connection.
The executives at airlines ignore me and my kind because they can. Sorry about the invective, but we need some sort of pipeline or wormhole so we can pour it on the people who deserve it.
Maybe the real Passenger's Bill of Rights should say "For each 1000 customer complaints, the CEO of the airlines must spend a day in the stocks in Times Square." See how they put up with discomfort.
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I didn't find the last article so problematic...
I didn't read any of the letters, but I did read the article, and while I found the UPS/call center analogies to be poor, I think the aspersions cast on the author were way over the top. I appreciated the explanation of what is going on behind the scenes when delays occur. I do think, though, that at some point keeping people onboard a delayed aircraft becomes the equivalent of involuntary imprisonment. (I am remembering one very delayed flight I took with my 3 year old. For 90 minutes, we sat on the runway. For the last 40 minutes of that delay, I was repeatedly told that I could not, under any circumstances, take my child - who was desperate to pee, and loudly announcing so to the entire plane - to the bathroom. Because, of course, "we might be cleared to take off at any moment.") I would have gotten off that plane in a heartbeat, had it been allowed. Airlines need to realize that passengers are *people*, not head of cattle whose needs can be completely ignored. Until then, they will continue to be widely loathed.
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Allow me to be the first
Sorry Patrick, nice try, but you didn't get this one right.
You started out sounding apologetic and thoughtful, stating that the overwhelming number of letters you got, cogent, obscene and otherwise, made you think that maybe the point of your last column, or at least the way you explained a few things in it, were not quite right.
You then begged a brief diversion to whine and play one-upmanship with a specific reader (whose statement remains, by the way, correct; she wrote that pilots make *up to* $150,000 per year, which is true; we now understand that you don't). However, a page and a half later, it seemed that though you had gotten back on point, your whining had balloned into a full-blown tantrum, and though I was quite interested in your insight, you had to say, I felt as though you were now yelling at me, or at very least, being snidely condescending.
You crankily say that you wrongly assumed that readers would see past the raw mechanics of your faulty comparison. That of course, belies the whole reason that good writers get published, and bad ones do slightly less often. Really now, if that were the case, why would we need GOOD writers. We could just get crappy ones and figure it out ourselves. (Sorry, couldn't resist some of the sarcasm you so tartily described.)
You self-assuredly describe that no fliers would be willing to pay $20 dollars more for better comforts and being treated like human beings. I think that is simply not true. Currently such differentials may not work because no one actually expects to get their additional money's worth. As you say yourself, we get a bunch of companies providing the same unsatisfactory service across the board. As a matter of fact, many of us do choose to pay a little more to avoid airlines that we have had particularly bad experiences with a, and many will pay more for a ticket on an airline with which they have frequent flier miles, just to get the few perks associated with the membership.
The question is not about whether people are willing to pay extra for better service, it's a matter of believing that they will get the better service, consistently. Without any assurance of that, there's no incentive to pay a premium. If, on the other hand, an airline were willing to make clear statements about how they would make reasonable and courteous amends for common problems, and actually delivered, their phones may start ringing off the hook.
You then go on to sarcastically (yourself!) describe your willingness to support legislation that you know won't work, just to make readers less knowledgeable than yourself feel silly. This is not a strong tactic to grow your readership. I don't know if anyone wrote and said that the delay threshold should be 2 hours, and not 3, but whining is not the answer. If they were wrong, concede that it's a good idea, but tell us that there are many considerations (which you described quite eloquently, and had you done so in your last column, you probably would have drawn less fire) and that such legislation would have to be very carefully thought out to deal with all of them. Maybe 2 or 3 hours isn't the correct number, but I'm willing to bet that 7 hours into the JetBlue delay, no one was thinking, we've only got 20 minutes to wheels up, so we better just sit tight. (And yes, I know that you didn't support this action, but your crabbiness about the whole thing is making people feel like you did.)
On the other hand, a request to be promptly notified of delays is not an unreasonable request. People have an amazing ability to be patient if they just know what's going on, but too often these days, people don't get information from the airline until the last second.
Finally, I appreciate your point about the number of safe on time flights that occur every year, and I wish more people would remember that as they loudly sigh the announcement of each minor delay.
I like reading your column, it's interesting and informative, but I have to admit that it can be tiresome when instead of good explanations, we get venom.