Fragrant travelers—whether “natural” or due to perfume or cologne.“People love to fly,” says a Boeing “passenger satisfaction” official. “They just don’t love to fly today.” That’s putting it mildly. But just what makes air travel so crazy for so many can be hard to pinpoint. It’s more than the sum of specific annoyances, more even than the overall impersonality and occasional sheer indignity of the experience. It’s something deeply disquieting and sadly exposed in the tragedy of airline passenger Carol Gotbaum of New York.
Gotbaum died at age 45, self-strangled on restraints that held her to a bench at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport police facility in September 2007. She was en route to an alcohol rehab facility in Tucson but was not allowed to board her connecting US Airways flight (operated by Mesa Airlines) because, the airline said, she had arrived too late at the gate, some eight minutes before the flight was due to depart.
Distraught, she pleaded with the airline agents: “I am not a terrorist. I am a sick mother. I need help.” When Gotbaum began to weep and flail about, gate agents called the cops. Three officers wrestled the 105-pound woman to the ground, handcuffed her, and put her in the airport holding cell chained to a bench, alone and crying hysterically. They only checked on her when the crying stopped. Although the local coroner ruled the death an accident, the city paid the family $250,000 to settle a wrongful death suit. A police investigation found that nobody had acted illegally. But there had been no mercy for a woman obviously in crisis, a human being who really needed to make that plane.
The Gotbaum tragedy is extreme, but it speaks to an unsettling truth about what commercial flying has largely become. For all its technological wonder, air travel is today’s mass transit, bound by strict rules, rigid processes, tight schedules, and a desperate pursuit of efficiency and revenue. Perhaps unavoidably, it leaves precious little slack for simple humanity or random acts of kindness or grace. Not just for the relative few already on the edge and trying to cope with the craziness, but also for the millions of ordinary, less fragile travelers who regard flying with a mixture of contempt and dread. Many would rather drive. Even for trips up to 500 miles, air travel dropped 17 percent between 2000 and 2010.
Just stepping through the sliding doors into the rush-hour bedlam of New York’s LaGuardia Airport or Heathrow’s crowded Terminal 3 makes some people shaky. Airport workers recognize “the stare.” Lines of cart-shoving families intersect and snake across one another toward unseen podiums or checkpoints while recorded “threat” warnings drone on, lights glare, and grim-faced security operatives watch impassively. Everybody else is moving somewhere with apparent purpose—shades of that nightmare where you are always late, in the wrong line, forgetting to turn in that final paper, oversleeping for the exam.
Now add some small frustration to the background stress: a cancelled flight, a long delay, an officious gate agent or brusque security screener, a fellow passenger who reclines his seat an inch too far or an overfilled overhead bin. Even the most reasonable people can lose it, and many do. Every other day on average, the FAA gets an official report of an incident with an “unruly passenger”—also known as an “air rage” incident. That’s more than 3,000 reported since 1995, but those are just the small percentage that lead to criminal prosecution or FAA enforcement action. Flight attendant unions estimate it’s more like 4,000 incidents a year, a dozen a day on average. Based on JetBlue’s experience with disruptive passengers in 2011, a Wall Street Journal analysis projected that 17,000 passengers were barred from or kicked off US flights annually—that’s almost 50 people each day. Instead of pillows and amenity kits, today’s planes are stocked with passenger “restraint kits” to be used, in the words of a British manufacturer, “once all efforts at communication have failed.”
Sky-high tension isn’t just aloft. At major hub airports, you can sometimes sense a kind of “ground rage.” Watch the security screening lines at busy travel times and you’re bound to witness at least a shouting match. At the international check-in desk, overwrought passengers are so common that some airline staff have a special word for them—“irates.” At Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans in November 2011, a 30-year-old man got so frustrated at a Continental self-check-in kiosk that he punched out the computer screen. A gate agent in Newark spent five days in a coma with a broken neck after an altercation at the gate about a family’s boarding passes for a long-delayed flight to Disney World.
Corralling tired, crying kids for hours in stuffy, crowded boarding areas is bad enough, but in flight, the inducements to craziness are magnified by passengers’ utter lack of autonomy. If the airport is too much, you can walk away, hop in a cab, and go get a beer, or maybe a Valium. Once the plane door closes, though, that choice is gone. We’re infants—literally almost immobilized, belted half-prone for hours in our reclined seats in a dimly lit tube, window shades pulled down “for better viewing.” We’re told when we may visit the bathroom, where we may not “congregate” (near the cockpit), and when it’s time for sleep. Our senses perhaps dulled slightly by mild hypoxia (a little less oxygen gets to the bloodstream and, by extension, the brain, at normal high-altitude cabin pressures), we’re regularly watered and, until recently, fed. Our captain’s soothing voice tells us to sit back and relax.
Treated like infants, we’re more likely to act like them. Also like infants, when we don’t get what we want—no food, no space in the overhead bin, no more booze, no cell-phone use, no legroom—we sometimes throw tantrums. Crammed together in our airborne survival tube, we resent the lack of control, so we complain bitterly about being kept in the dark when things go wrong. We demand to know precisely why our flight is delayed, even though we can’t possibly do a damn thing about it—because it gives us at least the illusion of control. Regulators recognize the craving: new DOT rules in 2010 require pilots not just to inform tarmac-delayed passengers what’s happening, but to update them every half hour.
Even more than we crave another two inches of precious legroom or an uncontested armrest, we seek dominion over our tiny personal environment even in the crowded confines at 35,000 feet. Passengers get crazy when the guy in front reclines his seat into their knees. It’s not just because we’re cramped or bumped, but because they’re invading our domain—that pathetically small realm we “own” on board. In 2011, a seatback-recline battle got so bad on a fully loaded United Boeing 767 that the plane had to return to the airport, escorted by F-16 fighter jets. More recently, five sheriffs’ deputies were called to the airport when a passenger on an overnight Alaska Airlines flight flew into a rage after a nearby passenger declined to turn off her overhead reading light. No wonder we don’t touch our seatmate’s “gasper”—that little knob above your head that lets you, and you alone, manage the airflow to your minuscule piece of cabin turf. We push our own buttons.
Aircraft makers and some airlines get it. The new Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” was designed to add new passenger control buttons. One of them makes the window darker in five successive levels of opacity—lots more to control than just a simple plastic window shade. In the same way, individual seatback movie screens are about much more than just clearer viewing, or even the actual entertainment programming. Just as important is the range and number of “choices” and channels. Virgin America lets passengers order a drink or meal on their own seatback touchscreens. You could just as easily stand up, walk down the aisle to the back of the plane, and grab a Coke (and it’s probably healthier to get the exercise and leg stretch), but ordering by “fingertip control” satisfies more than thirst: it keeps control freaks happy, even sane, in a place where feeling out of control can trigger panic or air rage.
Particularly when alcohol comes into the mix, misbehavior can become extreme. That’s what happened on the 11-hour United flight from Buenos Aires to New York in October 1995, when an intoxicated senior investment banker from tony Greenwich, Connecticut, was refused more booze. Seated up front, the banker, age 58, tried to help himself to more, but was rebuffed by the flight attendants. In the words of the FBI affidavit, “A male flight attendant then entered the first class section and saw [the passenger] with his pants and underwear down defecating on a service cart used by the flight crew. [The passenger] then used linen napkins as toilet paper and wiped his hands on various service counters and service implements used by the crew. [He] also tracked feces throughout the aircraft.” The banker pleaded guilty to assault, got two years’ probation, and paid a $50,000 cleaning bill.
The mystery may be why there aren’t more airline folks like Stephen Slater, the veteran JetBlue flight attendant who, confronted by one too many obnoxious passengers in August 2010, famously grabbed a couple of beers from the galley, pulled the emergency-evacuation inflatable chute, and slid to freedom, more or less, on the JFK tarmac—the ultimate “Take this job and shove it.”
Air rage lies at the far end of a continuum of stress shared to some degree by most fliers—81 percent of them according to a University of Washington survey taken in the months right after 9/11. Stress has become part of the whole air-travel experience. It’s no surprise then that airlines in 2011 ranked last out of 47 US industries in the University of Michigan’s annual American Customer Satisfaction Index. That year, one airline, Delta, ranked the second-to-worst company for customer satisfaction among the 225 companies in the survey.
So what is it, exactly, that makes for the pervasive hassle of air travel? We can deconstruct the unhappiness into specific pockets of air-travel pain, but beyond the individual irritants and indignities, there’s the larger question: Does commercial air travel—even when understood as a kind of mass transit for nearly two million people flying over America every day—really need to be the hassle it’s become for so many over the last decade?
“Your Flight Has Been Delayed”
Just that phrase—with all its finality and blame-deflecting passive voice—is enough to make the throat tighten and teeth clench. Delays cost US travelers an estimated 320 million wasted hours in the peak travel year of 2007. That’s otherwise productive time worth $12 billion, according to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee in May 2008, not to mention the $19.1 billion those delays cost the airlines, themselves, in operating costs such as overtime pay, extra fuel and maintenance, and lost flying time. During the same busy year, more than a quarter of all flights were delayed. By 2011, that record improved significantly—fewer than one in five flights were delayed—and on-time performance is getting better, largely because airlines are, for now, simply flying less.
Nationwide on-time statistics don’t tell the full story, though—especially for the tens of millions of travelers at a handful of America’s busiest hub airports, where delays are far worse than average. The three large New York–area airports plus Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago accounted for 80 percent of all delayed flights in 2009, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in May 2010. Flying into Newark on a summer evening, your chance of arriving on time is closer to 50-50. And when delays do occur, they’re New York– sized, too—more than a solid hour on average in 2011.
Even flights reported as “on time”—defined as arriving within 15 minutes of schedule—are commonly delayed well beyond how long they “should” take. Government “on-time” statistics actually measure “onschedule” performance—whether your flight arrives when the airline scheduled it to arrive. So the easiest way to “improve” your airline’s on-time performance is just to pad your schedule. And that’s what happens. Delta’s Flight 715 from New York to Los Angeles was scheduled for six hours in 1996, a Wall Street Journal analysis by Scott McCartney found; now it’s scheduled to arrive “on time” in seven hours. That 15 percent increase in travel time has nothing to do with Continental Drift. Similarly, my early morning flight from Washington, DC’s Reagan National to New York LaGuardia in December 2012 was scheduled for only 61 minutes; the evening rush-hour flight was “on time” if it made the identical journey in the scheduled 89 minutes.
Are airlines playing games to make their widely reported on-time rankings look better, or are they just being more honest with passengers by scheduling realistically? In fact, regulators insist that airlines tell fliers when they can really expect to get where they’re going—not just how long the plane could fly the route on a “severe clear” low-traffic Sunday morning. On some routes, delays have become so predictable that it would be deceptive not to build them into airline schedules. Regulations prohibit scheduling too optimistically—with potential fines for carriers whose flights are so “chronically late” they arrive more than a half hour behind schedule more than half the time. A USA Today analysis found that, statistically, flights have in effect slowed down—from 358 miles per hour in 1998 to 342 miles per hour in 2007. Strange that in a world where technology is accelerating the speed of everything, flying from point A to point B typically takes longer in 2011 than it did two decades earlier.
Common wisdom blames delays on congestion—too many planes trying to land and take off at the same time, while FAA controllers slow everything down to keep them from crashing into one another. It’s only partly true. The FAA tries to keep the lid on delays with a process once known as “flow control.” An hour outside Washington, DC, where suburban sprawl meets Virginia Hunt Country, is the safety agency’s futuristic National Air Traffic Control System Command Center. “It’s the FAA’s nerve center,” said the agency’s head in 2008. “NASA has mission control, we have this.” The facility oversees the entire national airspace system—a hierarchy of hundreds of airport towers that control planes on the ground and “own the airspace” within five miles of each airport; scores of “TRACONs” (I’ll spare you the full name) that handle departing and approaching flights up to about 40 miles from the airport and below 10,000 feet; and the 20-odd “En Route” Control Centers responsible for “handing off” planes flying at altitude across more than five million square miles of US airspace.
Despite its complexity, the object of the exercise is pretty simple—to smooth out the constantly changing stresses on the national aviation system: a line of funnel clouds in Oklahoma, a key runway blocked for maintenance at JFK, an electrical outage that takes down navigational aids for aircraft landing at fog-bound Juneau. The task is to curtail the bottlenecks, current or predicted, that constrict the “flow” of airplanes anywhere from San Diego to Bangor. The mechanics and technologies, though, are complex and time-intensive. Decisions made in flow control on any given day and hour will have a lot to do with whether you make it home in time to kiss the kids before they go to bed.
When the skies near an airport or region get too crowded for comfort (in FAA-speak, when a “sector” of the national airspace begins to get “saturated”) the FAA typically issues a “ground delay program.” This keeps planes waiting on the ground, not burning fuel in the air, until congestion dissipates along the planned flight route or at the destination. Computers generate an average and a maximum delay time, and every affected flight gets an “expect [sic] departure clearance time” and later, as takeoff time approaches, a “wheels up” time. FAA delay programs have made “circling” airports for hours largely an anachronism. Other tools are used to keep planes in the air safely “separated” by a precise minimum mileage distance, known as “miles-in-trail,” that depends on their altitude, aircraft type, location (whether near busy airports or cruising at high altitude, where the norm is five nautical miles) and other factors. Planes can be directed to fly off course along “delay vectors”; ordered to just slow down; or sometimes to simply “hold” over a specific area at a designated altitude until they can be fitted safely into a congested airport landing pattern.
If things are getting really sticky—say, an unanticipated thunderstorm blocks a standard departure and arrival route or there is, again in FAA-speak, “an overabundance of airplanes … at the destination air-port”—the agency may up the ante, elevating a ground delay program to a full-bore “ground stop.” A ground stop means nobody heading to the destination goes anywhere and, what’s worse, nobody can definitively say when they will. Adding to the uncertainty is that while ground stops are usually issued for short periods of time, they’re extended as long as needed. Ground stops are the times when harried airline gate agents earn more than their pay mollifying choleric Type A’s who rage on that the airline “keeps saying different things” about when their flight will leave. The fact is that nobody knows when the flight will leave. How soon will the tornado stop churning along the path to your destination?
How much your flight is delayed often isn’t entirely out of your airline’s hands, though. Even when the FAA imposes a ground delay, airlines can typically pick and choose which of their flights to the same region go first and which keep sitting at the gate. Air traffic controllers don’t normally care which of the airline’s Boeing 737s heading to the New York area takes off first. So get this, you Type A’s: your airline can decide to move your flight to the head or to the back of the line—depending on how much “priority” they give it. They can just trade “wheels-up” times with another flight. Try not to take it personally, though. Delay priority decisions are generally based on economics—like which plane has more passengers connecting to lucrative overseas long-haul markets, which crews are nearing the end of their maximum permitted “on-duty time,” and whether your airplane has to be somewhere later tonight to avoid cascading delays tomorrow morning. Does it matter if there are lots of high-paying business travelers or a VIP on board? Airlines don’t say.
Contrary to popular belief, the main reason for delay has little to do with “system” problems like heavy traffic volume, congested air space, air traffic control, or bad weather. Together, they accounted for only a quarter of 2011 delays. Nearly a third of the time, delays are the fault of what the FAA calls “circumstances within the airline’s control”—things like aircraft maintenance (something on the plane needs fixing), crew staffing (the copilot overslept), late baggage, or fueling. From a broader perspective, though, endemic air travel delay—though reduced recently to one in five or six flights—is just the predictable consequence of a massive, intricately interdependent aviation system straining to operate at the fine edge of its capabilities. Within that window, there’s simply precious little margin for the inevitable screwups, acts of God, and “stuff happens” scenarios of the real world. Consider the stresses on a system approaching a billion passengers annually by the mid-2020s:
Tight and Fast
Start with the pure economic incentive to keep hellishly expensive planes in the air when passengers want to fly. The prime revenue directive is to schedule planes tight and turn them fast. The faster you can “turn” a modern jet around—from landing and unloading to loading and taking off again—the more money that shiny new $80 million Boeing 737 generates. (If you’re really good at “the turn,” like Southwest, you can even squeeze in an extra flight full of paying passengers every day.) Financial analysts obsess about this “aircraft utilization rate”—how many hours a day each plane is flying (from when the door closes to depart to when it opens on arrival) as opposed to just sitting on the ground being maintained, serviced, loaded, or just waiting at the gate. JetBlue’s jets flew 11.7 hours a day in 2011, compared to those at American that spent only 9.6 hours each day making money (albeit on longer wide-body routes and different networks). Guess which airline turned a profit.
Stormy Weather
Weather is involved in roughly half of all flight delays, but the really extreme stuff—such as tornadoes and blizzards that shut down airports—accounted for only about 4 percent of delays in 2011. Large jets routinely navigate serious turbulence and heavy snows, not to mention 50-million-volt lightning bolts. What much more commonly triggers delays is the run-of-the mill fog or icy drizzle that hardly merits an umbrella but that limits what pilots and tower controllers can actually see. When that happens, good weather “visual flight rules” won’t work to keep airplanes safely separated. The time-honored “see-and-avoid” flying technique requires that the pilot can, in fact, see—typically, for at least three miles in the vicinity of busy airports, with specific minimum clearances between the plane and any clouds. Otherwise, the FAA imposes “instrument flight rules”—and this inevitably slows everything down.
Switching from “visual” to “instrument” rules can easily cut hourly flight operations 15 to 25 percent or more, depending on the airport and its navigation facilities. Planes must stay farther apart to add a safety cushion along busy air traffic lanes, or “airways.” That means longer waits between takeoffs as well as staggered landings, all designed to increase spacing between planes—like tapping your car’s brakes to lengthen your distance from the driver you’re following on a foggy, icy highway. Things move slower on the tarmac, too, as tower controllers need more time to guide huge aircraft along taxiways.
Scheduling Games
When it comes to delays, airlines don’t mind being seen as innocent victims—either of acts of nature or some ill-defined government (usually FAA) incompetence. Pilots tell their impatient, tarmac-bound passengers that they’re just waiting for air traffic controllers to give them a departure slot. If only those darn controllers would get to work! The truth is, though, the airlines aren’t exactly innocents in many delay scenarios: According to the FAA, they knowingly schedule more flights at crowded hubs and crowded times than the airport can handle.
The problem is that everybody—especially airlines’ best business customers—wants to fly out between eight and nine in the morning and fly back home between five and six in the evening. So airlines naturally try to schedule, advertise, and sell them those conveniently timed flights. But there is a physical limit. Not all of those desired flights can be crammed into those two “preferred” rush hours. The system goes tilt and everybody is delayed. On the other hand, each airline individually has every incentive to schedule as many flights as it can cram into the half hour when passengers most want to fly. If they don’t, they assume their competitors will. Even if the ultimate result is that everybody’s flight ends up waiting on the tarmac, airlines can always blame the predictable delays on the FAA.
Former FAA administrator Randy Babbitt got sufficiently ticked off to call the airlines out. In a tough 2010 speech, he declared that the FAA “will not sit back and be the scapegoat” for delays. “If you have twenty flights scheduled to take off in a single five-minute window, you’ve just created a bow wave of delays that’s likely to last all morning, maybe all day,” he said. “It’s just not going to work.” The airline trade association spokesman offered a “who-me?” response: We’re just “schedul[ing] flights to meet the expectations of consumers who want to fly at convenient times”—apparently even if that means nobody’s “expectations” are fulfilled.
Except for jawboning, though, there’s only so much regulators can do about airline overscheduling. There’s no law against it and antitrust laws normally preclude airlines from getting together to agree on saner schedules except in rare situations. At a few perennially delayed hubs—including Chicago, New York, and Washington National—overscheduling got so bad that regulators had to step in directly with a “temporary” fix—but that was in 1968. Nearly a half century later, that temporary solution is largely still in place: a system of “slots” (hourly takeoff and landing “reservations”) that can be bought and sold. The going rate in 2011 to obtain the slots to operate a well-timed daily flight at DC’s close-in airport was about $5 million; peak-time slot pairs at London’s Heathrow were recently valued at $50 million. LaGuardia slots were a bargain at $4 million per takeoff and landing.
Ripple Effects, Chokepoints, and Murphy’s Law
Commercial aviation is the poster child for Murphy’s Law. Take the seemingly simple matter of finding an open boarding gate when your plane lands. Without one, you’re sitting on the tarmac, maybe just 50 tantalizing yards from escape, but you’re not making that meeting, no matter how early your flight touched down. The folks waiting in the terminal to board that incoming airplane to fly elsewhere are cooling their heels too. Especially at busy hubs where each gate may handle more than half a dozen flights every day, airlines assign gate coordinators to do little else than manage that game of Tetris.
Gate availability is just one of the many little airline-caused delay triggers. A late-arriving flight attendant or copilot or a bag-handler’s ill-timed coffee break can be at fault. Planes can’t leave without the FAA-prescribed complement of one attendant per 50 seats. Or there could be a last-minute “mechanical” or “maintenance discrepancy.” Is it just a burnt-out cockpit warning light, or a critical part that requires repair (by an FAA-certified mechanic) before takeoff?
Small glitches beget big delays down the line. They tend to cumulate, each building on the last, cascading across the country throughout the day, with precious little built-in cushion to let flights make up lost time. Blame in part the hub-and-spoke system; most US fliers “connect” to their destinations through only a dozen or so big hub airports like Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta Hartsfield, and Dallas/Fort Worth. (The 30 busiest hubs account for two-thirds of all US flight boardings.) Delays can ripple across the continent when a major hub gets “stuck”—say, a runway ices, air traffic overloads, or some hopeless romantic can’t resist ducking past the TSA security checkpoint to kiss his girlfriend good-bye at the gate (an incident that shut down Newark Airport’s Terminal C for six hours in 2010).
Some 40 percent of delays stem from the late arrival of your plane from somewhere else, so by the end of the day, short delays have grown into long delays. Flying from the nation’s largest hub airports in July 2012, on average, your chance of an on-time departure between seven and eight a.m. was nearly 50 percent better than if you flew between seven and eight p.m., according to DOT figures. At ultra-congested airports like Newark International, the difference between early morning departures (about 80 percent on time) and evening flights (about 50 percent on time) was even more dramatic.
Ultrabusy hubs are the fragile backbone of the aviation system when it comes to delays. At Chicago O’Hare, the nation’s second busiest airport by departures, flights take off or land at the rate of 100 every hour of the day on average. Add to that the pressure of flight “banking,” the airline practice of tightly choreographing schedules to create dense “waves” or “banks” of flights all arriving or departing close to the same time. This reduces the time that travelers have to spend waiting on the ground at connecting airports for their onward flights and also keeps planes making money flying. Tight hub scheduling can leave only 35 to 50 minutes, depending on airline and airport, to move passengers and, hopefully, their luggage, from their arriving domestic flight to the boarding gate for their onward departing domestic flight. It’s challenging enough in optimal conditions—now add to the mix an approaching line of severe thunderstorms.
Some mega-hubs are so perennially clogged that DOT has labeled them “chokepoints.” Out of 4,000 US public airports, only seven accounted for about 80 percent of all delays in 2011, but the nation’s largest aviation market, Greater New York (including Philadelphia and Teterboro in New Jersey), was the worst chokepoint of all. New York is used to superlatives; its three huge airports handled 3,200 flights every day in 2010, more than 100 million passengers coming and going every year. But consider this: in the first six months of 2011, this one metropolitan area accounted for nearly half of all US flight delays. Flights bound for Newark Airport alone accounted for 40 of the nation’s 100 most-delayed flights, according to data compiled for the Wall Street Journal in 2011. And here’s the kicker: a third of all delays are caused in some way by New York airspace congestion, the New York Times reports. In the interconnected architecture of the nation’s airspace, New York congestion affects everything downstream. Wonder why your afternoon flight from sunny Dallas to even sunnier Albuquerque is delayed? Blame heavy morning fog over Long Island that slowed your plane’s first flight of the day from JFK to DFW.
Bag Wars
For sheer travel anxiety, not much beats standing around the baggage carousel after a long flight while everybody else retrieves their stuff from the belt and the remaining bags start to thin out. No wonder travelers cite lost luggage—even if statistically rare—as a serious grievance.
The airline industry doesn’t talk about “lost” luggage at all; the preferred term (which also covers pilfered, delayed, and damaged luggage) is “mishandled,” presumably on the theory that there’s always hope. But whatever it’s called, luggage that’s not there when you arrive—bleary-eyed and jet-lagged after hours in transit—is no fun. In its “Fly Rights” consumer guide, DOT chirps that “only a tiny percentage of checked bags is permanently lost.” But then it adds—rather breezily—that “your bag might be delayed for a day or two.” No problem—unless, of course, it’s your only bag, the one with the baby formula and diapers and the keys to your car.
Airlines were actually losing luggage only half as frequently in 2012 than five years earlier, when there were five to six mishandled bag reports for each 1,000 domestic passengers. How often bags are mishandled seems, predictably, to track pretty closely the ups and downs of air traffic generally. Hefty new bag-check fees have helped reduce the crunch too. The fewer bags checked, the fewer bags lost. As airlines instituted fees for checking bags in 2008 and 2009, the number of checked bags per passenger reportedly dropped 40 to 50 percent; it’s no surprise that the rate of mishandled bags also improved 40 percent from 2007 through 2009. Better bag-tracking and bag-handling technology also played a role.
A 3-in-1,000 risk of any passenger losing luggage (really a higher statistical risk for those fliers who actually checked a bag) seems low, but it means US airlines are still mishandling more than 5,000 bags every day, with nearly two million reports of mishandling in 2011. The good news, though, is that close to 98 percent of lost bags eventually make it back to their owners. According to a 2011 report by SITA, a provider of IT and communications services to the aviation industry, more than 50 percent of those bags worldwide are returned within 42 hours, and the great bulk of the rest get there eventually. There’s plenty of financial incentive for US airlines to make that happen; they can be required to pay passengers up to $3,300 for the depreciated value of their lost luggage and its contents. Even if the lost bag is eventually retrieved, estimates are that airlines spend $90 to $100 to deal with a mishandled bag. Retrieving and otherwise dealing with lost luggage cost airlines worldwide nearly $3 billion in 2010—not including unhappy customers and, for US airlines, the lousy public relations from poor DOT consumer rankings.
So airlines spend serious money and effort idiot-proofing the labor-intensive luggage process. TSA estimated in 2008 that six to ten airline or airport workers touch a bag for every TSA officer who does so, according to news reports. Workers at many airports are supposed to hand-scan each bag before loading to make sure it’s on the right flight; a warning sounds if it isn’t. (“Supposed to” because some baggage handlers reportedly resist scanning; it interferes with the preferred bag-heaving “rhythm.”) Scanners also help stop workers from unloading bags meant to remain on a “through” flight. Then there are simpler fixes—like training check-in agents to make sure baggage labels are straight and visible so automatic scanners can read them.
The deeper mystery is this: What in the world really happens when our Samsonite drops into the dark maw behind the airport check-in desk or drop-off? And why does it get screwed up? (Or in FAA-speak, what’s the “failure mode”?) Simplified, here’s what’s supposed to happen to checked luggage making its way through a typical large hub, and why it sometimes doesn’t.
Step One: The check-in agent prints out an adhesive bag tag that includes a bar code, a flight number, and a three-letter destination airport code, and it all gets attached to your luggage handle. The bar code will be read later by automated sorting devices using laser scanner arrays.
Failure Mode: A check-in agent uses the wrong city destination code for your bag tag, sending your luggage to San Juan, Puerto Rico (code: SJU) instead of San Jose, California (SJC) or San Jose, Costa Rica (SJO). Or, the check-in agent has poor “baggage hygiene.” (They really call it that.) They’re supposed to stick your roller bag on the belt wheels-up, with at least three feet between bags, which helps avoid jam-ups (a perennial problem with long tubes, skis, and loosely strapped luggage), and oversized bags are supposed to go elsewhere.
If the printed strip with the bag tag attached to your luggage gets shredded, smudged, folded, ripped, spindled or dislodged, your bag can’t be automatically sorted and—uh-oh—it’s sent to a default pile, where a human eventually has to look at it and retag it. Or the bag has more than one bag tag—it’s amazing how many people think it’s neat to collect bag tags—which confuses the scanner. Bag-tag bar code readers have only about 80 to 90 percent accuracy, according to Popular Mechanics, but bag tags at large airports increasingly incorporate radio-frequency identification chips that improve automatic reader accuracy. Ticketing and tagging errors cause about 16 percent of mishandled luggage worldwide, says SITA.
Step Two: Your bag drops down a conveyor belt behind the check-in podium, where it travels on a belt at 5 to 10 miles per hour (some new systems nearly double that speed) to security screening. Since 9/11, all luggage in the cargo holds of passenger airlines gets screened. Not by humans, but by million-dollar CT-scan machines. The machines image up to hundreds of “slices” of each bag, enabling TSA agents peering at high-resolution screens in a windowless room somewhere else to remotely “see into” about three bags a minute. Newer “in-line” models reportedly screen up to 500 bags every hour. Suspicious contents can be instantly checked against vast libraries of stored image files. (Is that pistol really a novelty hair dryer made in Hong Kong in 1982?) Based on their years of experience, human screeners can “resolve” roughly a third to a half of the bags (it varies) that the CT scans find suspicious, without resorting to a time-consuming manual search of the bag.
Bags that don’t look or smell funny (that is to say, explosive) get to move on. Some airports, such as Denver, load them onto 20-mileper-hour unmanned carts—like miniature roller-coaster cars—called destination-coded vehicles. With the tag on each bag optically scanned, at the correct junction of the conveyor belt another sorting machine diverts the bag and dumps it down another chute, where it lands at the luggage-sorting station or carousel near your flight’s boarding gate. (Sometimes, multiple flights will use the same carousel—uh-oh again.)
If your bag does set off an alarm—there are lots false positives in the hypersensitive scanning machines—and the screen-watchers can’t resolve it, the bag goes down farther to the Baggage Inspection Room—what some airports have affectionately referred to as “the Bomb Room.” There, one of a half dozen inspectors wearing blue latex gloves physically opens the suspect bag—they’ve got hundreds of keys to open luggage locks—trying not to bust the luggage. (The TSA doesn’t say how often it happens, but at least at one major US hub, inspectors find “something” every year that requires them to evacuate the room and call the local bomb squad.) If your bag was opened for inspection, you may have found a nice time-stamped note left by the friendly screener. They do try to get your stuff back on the conveyor belt in time for it to be loaded onto your flight; even in the basement inspection room they have flight departure monitors. But don’t count on it.
Failure Mode: The object of the baggage process is to move your bags faster than you yourself can move—from check-in desk to departure gate, or from arrival gate to baggage carousel, or from your arriving plane to your connecting flight. When your bags can’t get there before you do—say, the underground high-speed conveyor belt (picture Disney World’s “Wild Mouse Ride”) gets snagged on a fashionable bag strap or outsized zipper pull—you may not see that bag for a while.
Every connecting hub has a minimum “legal” connecting time—often only 35 to 50 minutes. That’s how long the airline thinks two things can happen: the first is for you to drag yourself, your bulging carry-ons, and your tired kids off the plane and herd everybody down the hall to another boarding area—inevitably located at the other end of the crowded, quarter-mile-long concourse—where your next flight is leaving; the second is for the airline to retrieve your checked suitcase from the cargo hold of the plane you arrived on and load it onto the plane you’re departing on, also maybe halfway across the airport. Not that airlines don’t try—notice how baggage carts race around tarmacs at busy hubs to transfer “hot” bags from one plane to another—but bare-minimum connecting times multiply the chance of a baggage screwup.
Step Three: Once your luggage makes it to the bag assembly area below your gate, how hard can it be to get it the last few yards into the cargo hold of your nearby plane? You’d be surprised. Much depends on the ramp agent or “ramper”—occasionally also affectionately known in the trade as the “thrower” or “bag smasher.”
Failure Mode: “Touch a bag, read the tag” is the rule, but it’s not always followed. Bags can get overlooked, stuck on the wrong cart going to the wrong plane, arrive a minute too late. Not so rarely, they actually fall off moving carts on the way to the plane. Simple “failure to load” accounted for 15 percent of mishandled bags in 2011, according to SITA’s report. Let’s face it. Bag handling can be boring, repetitive, and tough when it’s 12 degrees or 120 degrees on the tarmac, jet engines are screaming, and the pressure is on to load and unload 100-plus bags in minutes to keep the plane on schedule.
Precisely how your suitcase is loaded into the cargo hold depends on the type of aircraft. On large wide-bodies like Boeing’s 777, 747, and 787 jets, bags normally go into explosion-resistant 5-by-10-foot cans known as unit load devices, which are then hoisted and slid snugly into the cargo hold below the seating level. Much more fun—if it’s not your cherished, hand-tooled leather trunk packed with keepsake crystal—is the way bags are loaded onto workhorse domestic jets like the 737, with its narrow 90-foot-long cargo hold. As described by travel journalist George Hobica of Airfarewatchdog.com, in his interview of a confessed “baggage thrower,” it will convince you never, ever, to pack anything fragile.
The ramp agent drives an angled conveyor belt to the door of the cargo hold, where another agent climbs inside. As a bag tossed from the cart onto the belt moves up to the door of the hold, the agent inside heaves it—slides it, bowls it, or throws it—to the end of the hold, where yet another ramp agent is waiting to stack it with the other luggage. This is not a delicate operation. Handlers are expected to be able to fill a 737 cargo hold with 150 bags in less than 30 minutes.
Will They Make Me Check It?
Even when luggage actually makes it there on time and in decent shape—as it most often does—the whole bag-checking issue has become a source of air-travel angst. With hefty checked-bag fees and potential delays, “Will they make me check it?” is on every flier’s mind. Since airlines started charging for your first checked bag in 2008, the temptation to cram a week’s worth of clothing into a small overnight suitcase can be overwhelming. Most US airlines have the same luggage size limits: carry-ons can’t exceed 45 “linear” inches—basically, 22" × 14" × 9" (think a good-sized tabletop microwave)—and must weigh less than 40 pounds; Southwest allows a few inches more.
And they are not kidding. Sharp-eyed airline staff are popping up at check-in counters and boarding gates. Even if you make it to the boarding gate with that so-called carry-on, you’re not home free. Europe’s Ryanair demands an extra “gate bag fee”—equivalent to about $50—assessed at the door to the airplane if your carry-on is deemed too big. In late 2011, Spirit Airlines went further, imposing a $100 penalty on folks trying to sneak aboard any carry-on that is too big to fit underneath the seat in front (and needs to go in the overhead bin) without paying Spirit’s “normal” $45 fee for that “service.” Sounds extreme, but more traditional airlines are also working on “how to prevent so many non-complying bags from reaching the gate” in the ominous words of a United Airlines spokesman quoted by New York Times aviation writer Joe Sharkey.
Getting your overstuffed carry-on past the gate agent is one thing, but even if the lone agent is too busy to bar the jetway door, you still have to jam it in the overhead without busting it—or your back. And if it doesn’t fit, you’re headed for the dreaded “gate check,” where you’re perp-walked, red-faced, back up the aisle against the stream of boarding passengers to the aircraft door; there the ramp worker hands you a receipt and unceremoniously chucks your bag (naturally, marked “fragile”) down a planeside metal tube, hopefully to be loaded aboard.
Lines upon Lines
Air travel can feel like just a series of waiting lines—lines to check in, lines for screening, lines to board, lines to collect luggage. Lines can become the travel experience, transforming us into Chaplin-esque drones shuffling splayfooted through endless queues to be packed, boxed, and shipped.
Air-travel lines are different than most. Normal queues are a response, an orderly alternative to rioting when multiple people are waiting for something they want. Those who sell that “something” want their lines to be as short and quick as possible, so they can sell more of it. Air-travel lines, on the other hand, seem more like a kind of punishment—their purpose, up to a point, to make the journey harder for those who pay less. Call me cynical, but without annoyingly long lines for the bargain-hunting masses, why would other passengers pay extra for “priority boarding”—in essence, a line-jumping pass—or better yet, a business-class ticket that avoids the long line entirely?
Airlines and airports tell passengers to arrive at the terminal up to three hours before the scheduled flight departure time. Unless you’re trying to fly coach to Mongolia on an expired passport with lots of luggage in August at rush hour, that seems like a crazy long time. Perhaps it helps contain airline labor costs—the second biggest expense category after fuel—by requiring fewer check-in and other airport staff. Sure, tighter staffing can mean longer passenger lines, but you’ll make your flight if you arrive early enough to spend extra time waiting in those lines. Think of it this way: airlines are trading their labor costs for your “standing-in-line” costs.
Not that long pre-flight waits necessarily bother the airports or the concessions that rent space from them either. Getting passengers to arrive hours in advance of their flights means more airport “dwell time,” which in turn means more time to spend money at airport shopping malls, food courts, and watering holes. And it’s not just Gucci and Prada. One of the biggest sources of revenue for all the stores beyond the security checkpoint is simply bottled water—commonly at $2 to $3 for 20 ounces—that can’t be brought through the screening line. (According to airport travel columnist Harriet Baskas, bottled water was the top-selling item even in rainy Seattle in 2006.) Telling passengers to arrive hours in advance also reduces pressure on the whole system—long security screening lines cause fewer missed flights and baggage handlers have more time to load aircraft—but is it really fair to the infrequent-flying innocents who actually follow the warnings and show up ridiculously early “just to be sure”?
Crowding and Cramming
Airplanes have never been as crowded as they are today. Well into the 1980s, many flew nearly half empty—literally. Until 1978, the federal government essentially set airfares (it had broad fare-approval authority) at levels that would ensure that airlines made a predetermined rate of return. To make those calculations, Civil Aeronautics Board officials had to make an assumption about how many fare-paying passengers would typically be aboard any given flight. Through the 1970s, the estimate was that 55 percent of seats on average would be filled.
The reality today is far different. Most reasonably timed flights are simply chock-full. From the 55 percent target of the 1970s, normal loads had grown to about two-thirds full by the mid-1990s, then almost three-quarters full in the 2000s. Today, the big US network carriers—United, Delta, American, and US Airways—technically average close to 85 percent full. Conveniently-timed flights in major markets are normally even fuller, though, since the overall average includes half-empty predawn flights to reposition aircraft for the day ahead, flights during the slowest post-holiday winter travel season, and lots of “non-rev” passengers—commuting or deadheading crew members and airline employees with travel privileges who fill unpaid seats and so don’t get counted in the official load-factor averages. In the real world, to put it simply, don’t expect empty seats.
Crowding means success in the airline business. Airlines spend about as much to fly a Boeing 737-800 carrying 20 paying passengers as the same jet crammed with 175 souls—maybe a few more bucks for the extra soft drinks. So the fuller the airplane, the better financially. For passengers, though, crowding amplifies all the other craziness that’s part of mass air travel.
Most obvious is seating comfort—aircraft designers call it “living space”—one of frequent travelers’ top two complaints in a 2010 Consumers Union survey of almost 15,000 fliers. Economy seats are all pretty much the same. For instance, they have to withstand a crash that exerts 16 G’s (16 times the force of gravity). That’s the limit of what the FAA thinks passengers could possibly survive hurtling forward against the seat in front in an “impact-survivable accident”—from 44 feet per second to a dead stop in about a tenth of a second. US airlines’ seats are all also about the same width—17 to 18 inches—to fit the common six-across coach configuration on most domestic jets and still keep the single aisle wide enough to let passengers evacuate the plane in 90 seconds in an emergency, as the FAA requires. (In a modest concession to developments in modern American anatomy, Airbus, the leading European aircraft manufacturer, is considering a slightly wider aisle coach seat for its A320 planes, but the other two seats in the row would lose nearly an inch each.)
It’s much easier to change the front-to-back space between seat rows, known as “seat pitch,” and it’s amazing what a difference an extra inch or two can make. Mechanically, it would be a simple matter to lengthen legroom spacing—seats are bolted to rails on the cabin floor and the spacing can be readily adjusted—but there’s a serious economic trade-off. Bean counters naturally want to cram the most possible salable seats onto the plane, and the easiest way to do so on large narrow-body workhorses like Boeing 737s and 757s and Airbus 320s is to shrink the seat pitch. Cutting just one inch of legroom for every seat on a 30-row plane generates an entire extra row of six paying seats—and the temptation to do so has proven hard for airlines to resist. One alternative: new seat designs that try to save that inch either by reducing the thickness of the seat cushion or limiting the range of seat recline with an “articulating pan” that moves the seat itself forward as the seatback moves rearward.
Seat pitch reflects each airline’s market niche and brand strategy. Ultracheap Spirit Airlines thinks its passengers will endure just about anything for a low fare—including the industry’s tightest seat pitch, just 28 inches between seats on its fleet of Airbus 320s. (The norm in coach is more like 31 to 32 inches.) That’s about as tight as an adult male can handle without sitting “side-saddle.” Plus, Spirit’s seats don’t recline—presumably for fear of injury to the poor unfortunate in the seat behind; the airline describes its immovable seats, apparently without irony, as “pre-reclined.” Nobody enjoys the ride, but Spirit can jam 174 paying seats into 29 coach rows of its A320—some 15 percent more seats overall than other airlines can stuff onto similar jets. United and Delta fill the same type of plane with about 148 seats, and “we-are-the-world” JetBlue, which promises to “bring humanity to air travel,” affords all passengers at minimum a relatively luxurious 34 inches of pitch on its A320 planes. But Spirit gets the last laugh: its stock price nearly doubled in value in its first year as a public company and the fast-growing airline remains consistently profitable, with industry-leading, double-digit operating margins into 2012.
Other People
Crowding exacerbates one of air travel’s worst horrors: other passengers. When “living space” for each passenger is so scarce, perceived invasions of personal space, even just by reclining your seat, can turn nasty quickly. That’s what happened May 29, 2011, on United’s late-evening Flight 990 from Washington Dulles to Accra, Ghana. One passenger reclined his seat all the way back, presumably smacking the knees of the person behind. The injured party allegedly slapped the recliner’s head. A shoving match ensued, despite the mediating efforts of a flight attendant and a passenger. Rather than head out across 5,000 miles of the Atlantic with a potentially uncontrollable ruckus in the back, the pilot decided to call it a night. The Boeing 767 with 144 passengers aboard circled for 25 minutes to expend some of the thousands of gallons of fuel that would have made the jet too heavy to land safely and returned to Dulles under F-16 fighter escort. No charges were pressed by authorities. Maybe they sympathized.
Personal-space wars extend well beyond the seatback recline battle to include, as we know, armrest wars, obesity spillover squeezes, and overhead-bin-space fights. The space-deprived middle seat is so anathema, according to a survey run by the Global Strategy Group and sponsored by 3M, that 50 percent of air passengers said they would wait for the next flight in order to get an aisle seat; one in five said they would rather stay overnight at an airport hotel for an aisle seat on the first flight out the next morning. According to IndependentTraveler.com, 9 percent of travelers simply refuse to sit in the middle seat on a full flight of more than two hours. Period.
Physical-space invasion is just the beginning when it comes to “other people” issues. Personal hygiene was near the top of the list of passenger annoyances, cited by nearly half of the 1,600 respondents in a 2009 Travelocity poll. Some 30 percent of those surveyed cited coughers and sneezers, and 15 percent objected to sitting next to obese passengers (though 44 percent of these travelers thought airlines should provide a second seat at no cost to obese fliers). Other frequently mentioned “other people” peeves include:
Fragrant travelers—whether “natural” or due to perfume or cologne.
The “inappropriately attired”—like the 23-year-old Hooters waitress and student whose denim miniskirt Southwest thought left too little to the imagination to fly in 2007, or the middle-aged gent wearing only women’s undergarments and high heels on a US Airways flight from Fort Lauderdale in 2011.
Make-yourself-at-home fliers—who remove shoes, and sometimes socks, at the first opportunity; clip nails (alas, not just fingernails); remove nail polish; change soiled diapers, and so on.
Not-so-cute kids—the nasty little seat kickers who pop up and turn around to drool on you.
The hygiene-challenged—nose-pickers and serial flatulators included.
Then there are the Mile-High Clubbers who can’t seem to resist the allure of sexual intimacy in the three-by-three-foot lavatory or, worse, in the seat across the aisle from you. Purists insist that the “club” is meant to include only those in flagrante while actually piloting an aircraft above 5,280 feet. Commercial airline pilots will tell you (perhaps a little ruefully) that this happens about as frequently as fatal US airline crashes do—in other words, almost never. But passenger sex isn’t quite so rare. Maybe it’s the vibration, the close quarters and dim lighting, or just hours with little to do, but a global annual survey by (who else?) a major European condom manufacturer found in 2005 that 4 percent of surveyed adults in the United States (2 percent globally) claimed to have had some kind of onboard sexual encounter. Professed enthusiasts include even airline gurus like Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson, who says his encounter at age 19 with an older woman in a Laker Airways lavatory en route to Los Angeles “was every man’s dream, to be honest.”
You’ve got to be pretty amorous. Aside from the obvious physical constraints and the gazillion germs that cover airplane lavatory surfaces, long stays in the loo make cabin crews nervous. On the tenth anniversary of the attacks, Frontier’s flight from Denver to Detroit was met by F-16 fighter jets when a couple retreated to the lav for “an extraordinarily long time,” according to the airline. So a public service announcement for would-be “clubbers”: For $300 to $1,000 or so, there are mom-and-pop air-charter operators who will fly you and your beloved around for an hour in a small propeller plane with a mattress-outfitted cabin about the size of a large SUV. Pilots wear headphones and promise to be very discreet.
And don’t forget the technology-addicted. The ones who play movies on their laptop without earphones—whether Dora the Explorer or Debbie Does Dallas—or, if they use earphones, can’t seem to shove their ear buds all the way in (allowing everyone to enjoy the throbbing bass line). Plus the self-important folks who can’t power off their iPhones during takeoff and landing like everyone else. Not to mention the drunks, the chatterboxes, and the folks with urinary problems who always insist on the window seat.
Yackety-Yack
The ultimate “other people” in-flight annoyance may be yet to come: the looming threat of the airborne cell phone. You’ll be able to learn so much about your seatmate’s medical problems or romantic crises or political leanings on those long, full flights! At least 3,000 planes worldwide were already wired for web connectivity in 2012, using onboard satellite technology that could be adapted to let fliers use their own cell phones for in-flight calls. There remain some safety questions in the United States, where federal regulations still bar airborne calls on the view that the devices’ electromagnetic transmissions could affect delicate aircraft avionics, but European safety authorities lifted their in-flight cell-phone ban in 2007 (though in-flight calling is still not common in Europe).
The FAA is taking a harder look at the safety of personal electronic gadgets, though it says it’s not about to consider cell phone calls. But absent a safety problem—current evidence is, at very most, equivocal on this issue—more widespread mobile phone use (voice and text) seems inevitable. It’s already offered on a few Persian Gulf carriers—Emirates Airlines’ 90 mobile phone–capable jets handled nearly 20,000 calls per month by 2012—and in-flight phoning is poised to become a competitive differentiator for high-end international fliers. When British Airways announced in-flight texting and web access on its financier-packed all-business flight from London City Airport to New York, it didn’t take long for archrival Virgin Atlantic to cross the sound barrier too—allowing in-flight voice calls on its transatlantic services. Virgin says it will only allow six passengers at a time to use the system and that it’s only meant for use—get this—“in exceptional situations.” We’re talking about New York business travelers here, folks. For them, “exceptional” is a 30-point drop in the Dow.
There’s a deep split of US opinion about in-flight mobile phone calls—not surprisingly, it falls largely along generational lines. A government survey released in 2008 asked fliers whether to allow cell phone use on planes if it’s safe. Nearly 40 percent said “definitely” or “probably” yes; nearly 45 percent said “definitely” or “probably” no, with some 15 percent unsure. Only a quarter of travelers over age 65 liked the idea, though, compared to nearly half of the 18-to-34 crowd. Meanwhile, a major flight attendants’ union is opposed, and frequent-flier surveys reflect opposition. The House of Representatives passed and sent a bill to the Senate in 2008 that never became law called the “Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace” Act (aka “HANG-UP”), which would have imposed a permanent federal ban on in-flight wireless phone calls and VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) communications.
Cell-phone-friendly airlines (they do get a cut of call charges) like Emirates profess special efforts to minimize annoyance, such as restrictions on nighttime-flight use. And for now, calls remain expensive—usually charged at international roaming rates—so they tend to be short, on average about two minutes, says Emirates. Still, communication costs invariably decline over time with new technology, and there may well come a day when chirping smart phones join engine whine as normal cabin background noise. Although limited experience with in-flight calling hasn’t triggered air rage, turn-offthe-phone battles with the phone-addicted have already turned nasty and Britain’s Association of Anger Management has a grim prediction about in-flight voice calls: “It would be a nightmare. We will see air rage statistics increase.”
Nickel-and-Diming
Nobody likes to pay for something they used to get for free, but fliers’ anger over the tsunami of fees and charges spawned by the airlines’ 2008 fuel-induced financial panic is about more than that. It’s also about the sheer scope of the new fees, their nagging appearance at every juncture of the journey and the constant drumbeat of marketing of the newly “unbundled” services. Just buying a ticket online requires navigating multiple screens of “options” for lounge access and queue-jumping and “upsells” for more legroom and “are-you-sure-you-don’t-want-to-do-the-responsible-thing-and-buy-travel-insurance?”—not to mention the come-ons for hotels, rental cars, and tours. It all drives home the disquieting notion that we’re merely transient sources of airline revenue to be mined for whatever we’re worth. No wonder that a Consumer Reports survey of thousands of air travelers in June 2011 found nickeland-diming at the top of the passenger grievance pile.
OK, we can live without “free” yummy airplane food or well-used blankets and pillows. These things feel like tangible extras it’s reasonable to be charged for, even if they used to be included in our airfare; after all, they cost the airline a little more to provide. On the same view, we might even swallow some modest fee to check luggage—it costs airlines labor and fuel to haul our stuff. But there’s a line beyond which we feel seriously ripped-off. Maybe it’s the fee just to check in, or to talk on the phone to a human reservations agent, or to stand by for an earlier, half-empty flight, or to stick our briefcase in the overhead, or to book a “free” trip with the frequent-flier miles we’ve “earned.” At some point, the loss of an amenity becomes an insult.
The expertly concocted smoke-and-mirrors rhetoric the industry deploys to justify the new fee-based business model and defuse consumer (and congressional) “outrage” is nearly as infuriating. Some of the language is positively Orwellian. New fees are about “giving customers more choice,” says Airlines for America, and “making choices and paying for services you use and value.” These “service choices [please, not ‘fees’] are not new,” writes the trade association’s CEO in a November 2011 USA Today op-ed. “Airlines began offering customers the option to pay for service they value” years ago. “If you look at what consumers want in the US,” echoes Delta’s CEO in a June 2012 NPR interview, “they want choice.” Some might argue that what they really want is more legroom, a bigger seat, and a free snack at a lower price. How could anyone object to “choice,” “value,” “service,” and having “options,” or be so dense as to confuse these virtues with just forking over more cash to the airline?
It’s not about adding new fees, airlines say. They’re just “unbundling” the prix fixe journey into a menu of à la carte offerings—merely deconstructing the journey into goods and services fliers thought were included in the ticket price. But there’s a serious logical disconnect: If we choose not to take the option of, say, checking a suitcase (since we “value” avoiding the lost-bag office), shouldn’t the basic airfare we pay go down? If “à la carte” means paying the same check for the complete dinner, but then adding a new extra charge for dessert, why shouldn’t we be ticked off? The industry’s most straightforward defense of fees came from the trade association’s top lobbyist in July 2011, when she was called to justify fare hikes to a Senate committee: “The airline industry is sick, it’s anemic,” she told the senators. “We have to be able to cover the cost of flying folks.”
No matter how much passengers hate the nickel-and-diming, there’s just too much money at stake for airlines to give it up. On average, fees for checked bags and hefty charges for “changing” a ticket—altering the time or date or routing, or sometimes just the traveler’s name—added $22 to the basic domestic ticket price in 2011. Checked-bag fees alone brought in more cash in the first three months of 2012 than the profits of the ten largest US airlines combined, according to The Economist. For the industry, nickel-and-diming made the difference between profit and loss. In 2011, the net profits of US airlines (excluding bankrupt American) totaled $2.3 billion; bag fees earned $3.4 billion. Do the math: these fees are not going away.
No Service, No Smile
Beyond the panoply of specific hassles, for many the most jarring change in air travel over the last decade or so has been the shift from reliance on humans to reliance on technology, from service to self-service. Start with your airline ticket. In 2000, tickets were almost all paper, sent by snail mail or purchased over the counter, and you handed it to a human check-in agent at the airport. Electronic tickets were introduced by United in 1994, but as recently as 2000, only about half of US airline tickets (a much smaller portion in other parts of the world) were electronic. By mid-2008, paper tickets—which cost about ten times what e-tickets cost to handle—were virtually eliminated. You could still get one if you paid extra—about 1 percent of passengers on staid British Airways did just that—but why bother? With e-tickets, there was no muss, no fuss, no worry about lost tickets, no tedious “re-issuance” of paper. Just book online, download to your smart phone, print your own bag tags, and go right to the gate.
That’s fine if you are young and tech savvy (and the Wi-Fi’s working). Now ask your 80-year-old aunt to do it. Good luck.
The unceasing drive for cost-lowering efficiency means that air travelers increasingly remain untouched by human hands—not counting those of TSA screeners. Human interaction is becoming a costly anachronism. Combine wages, pension benefits, and taxes, and the average all-in cost of a full-time worker for major US airlines came to a hefty $83,000 in 2011, according to researchers at MIT. Technology makes the self-service journey possible. “Paperless” boarding eliminates the wasted five seconds it takes to hand your pass to the gate agent at the jetway door, for the agent to scan it and say, “Thank you and have a good flight.” Why bother when you can have the electronic boarding pass texted to your mobile phone and you just silently flash the bar code at the automatic gate scanner’s red eye?
By 2020, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) says the industry group’s “Fast Travel” initiative will let passengers handle their own airport check-in, bag-tagging, rebooking, boarding, and even lost-luggage claims. The goal, according to an October 2012 IATA strategy paper: “reducing the number of passenger/agent touches”—in other words, a “seamless curb to airside experience” with the least possible human involvement. It’s all liberating, time-saving, efficient, and modern—but it also means one less smile or human glance along the way.