CLOUDY WITH SOME SIGNS OF CLEARING
Attend enough aviation industry gatherings and eventually you’re bound to hear some self-important after-dinner speaker invoke Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who observed, about 2,500 years ago, that “change is the only constant.” Especially over the last decade, it’s been an apt cliché for an airline business that seems always in crisis. Today, though, the truism is ever less true. Thirty-five years after the trauma of airline deregulation and more than a decade past September 11, the turbulence and uncertainty that seemed woven into the fabric of commercial aviation appear to be giving way to a new status quo—more stable and likely more enduring than most aviation folks could have imagined.
In this emerging aero-business environment, airlines turn a profit as often as not. Maybe it’s not enough to make investors happy—but it keeps companies in the black. Only recently, though, have owners and investors even begun to earn the kind of returns that, if sustained over a full multiyear business cycle, would cover their “cost of capital”—what investors normally expect from their investments. (All US airlines combined are still worth less in market capitalization than Starbucks.) Passengers pay more, one way or another, whether in fares or fees or surcharges or wasted time. Financial uncertainty remains, but at least the key variables are clear: the price of jet fuel, the strength of the economy (which translates into the demand to fly), the control of capacity, and, as always in today’s airline world, the avoidance of some unimaginable out-of-the-blue catastrophe.
A telling bit of evidence about the industry’s new durability from Airline Weekly: When fuel prices soared to $100 a barrel in 2008, US airlines lost $4 billion. When prices climbed nearly as high ($95 per barrel) in 2011, they made $2.5 billion. And they kept eking out profits through 2012, even after fuel again peaked above $100. As the industry association’s chief economist explained in August 2012, “What used to be a threat to [airlines’] existence [$100 per barrel oil] is now a threat to earnings.” The CEO of US Airways put it another way at an aviation conference in Dallas: “I think we’re finally on the brink of stability.” In other words, something fundamental about the industry is changing, and—fingers crossed in the executive suites—it’s likely to continue. What, exactly, happened? Essentially three things.
First, the industry shrank. Consolidation hasn’t reached the point where we just dial up “Airline” when we want to fly somewhere, but we’re approaching the logical end point that competition regulators once feared, a world of “3 + 3 + 3”: three huge network airlines, three nationwide low-cost carriers—each with more than 3 percent of the market (plus a few niche players)—and three global airline alliances. It’s been a long time coming—scores of new airlines have appeared and disappeared just since deregulation—but the last five years have witnessed a denouement as Delta swallowed Northwest, United merged with Continental, US Airways joined America West, and Southwest bought AirTran.
The final shoe drops if, as widely predicted, American’s 2012 bankruptcy leads to another merger, this time with US Airways. If the proposed $11 bilion merger to create the world’s largest airline happens, says an April 2012 analysis by J.P.Morgan, the Big Three airlines plus Southwest would control “close to 90 percent of domestic capacity,” compared to the roughly 50 percent they controlled in 2005. That’s a world that Wall Street has long yearned for—a much cozier marketplace for the fare-focused survivors. For investors, says J.P.Morgan airline analyst Jamie Baker, it would “represent the optimal industry structure, and should allow for consistent return generation going forward.…”
“Optimal” for airline owners, perhaps, but advice to consumers: at least over the long haul, hang on to your wallets.
Second, the airlines found ingenious new ways to extract more cash from fliers without raising basic airfares. “Unbundling” the product (once quaintly known as a “flight”) into lots of little chargeable services may not have added all that much to basic fares—about $22 to a $316 near-average round-trip in 2011, according to Airlines for America—but that’s still the same as a 7 percent fare hike. And that doesn’t include other uncounted “extras” that DOT doesn’t yet require airlines to report specifically, like buy-on-board meals, Wi-Fi and in-flight entertainment, blankets, certain assigned seats, telephone reservations, early boarding privileges—the whole shebang.
Without these ancillary fees, airline profits would remain almost as elusive and uncertain as ever. Whine all you want about fees, fellow fliers, as we’ve seen before, there’s just too much money at stake to expect them to end. They compose roughly 10 percent of all revenue for some of the largest traditional airlines, up to a whopping one-third for carriers like Spirit. Ancillary fees are here to stay and so, for that matter, are crowded planes.
Third, the decade since 9/11 saw a profound, if subtle, shift in the way airlines thought about the business. Forget the sentiment and the cowboy mentality of the risk-taking flyboys who started it all. As ever-quotable airline consulting guru Michael Boyd put it, “The crazy people are gone and now we’re going to have a reasonable airline industry that will make some money.” Soaring fuel prices? Dump the galleys, cut flights, and burn less, and do it quick. Rising labor costs? Lay off a quarter of the industry workforce—about 150,000 full-time jobs at the major airlines—and automate. Aircraft-maintenance expense rising as planes age? Park those gas-guzzlers in the desert. By 2012, mainline US fleets were 17 percent smaller than in 2000 as older, larger jets were replaced by newer, smaller, and more fuel-efficient planes. Passenger service? It depends what you mean by “service”—you get what you pay for. Computer algorithms dictate who gets the upgrade, no matter how much you smile at the gate attendant. And if you want the whole can of Coke, you have to ask.
These changes were foundational, philosophical, and signaled a whole new way of doing business for commercial aviation. Not that we’re somehow approaching the “end of history,” to borrow noted political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s phrase. The industry is still evolving, including internationally. Compare lists of the world’s ten largest airlines measured by paid passenger-miles in 2000 and in 2010, as compiled by the Centre for Aviation analytic and consulting organization. Only six carriers make both “top ten” lists; two of the 2010 top ten—Emirates and China Southern—didn’t even make the top 25 just a decade earlier. Or look at it this way: only about half of the world’s 25 biggest airlines (measured by total passengers) in 2010 made that category ten years earlier. Add to that the unique and constant vulnerability of the airline business. For all of its newfound stability, the entire industry remains one body-implanted bomb or major new Mideast war away from renewed financial grief.
What does this more stable and businesslike industry bode for everyday air travelers? Even if it’s far from utopian, it doesn’t have to be dystopian, either. After all, it’s an industry that’s already proven itself capable of surviving catastrophic terrorism, plagues, and widespread bankruptcy. With stronger finances, relatively stable fuel prices, and steady demand for flying, couldn’t it also deliver the “miracle” of human flight to everyday air travelers with a little more humaneness, civility, and comfort. There are reasons to be optimistic.
1. THE KIOSK
Harried travelers have grown to love the airport self-check-in “kiosk,” a promising herald of our automated flying future. Take it from a guy who once resisted even supermarket self-checkout lines: When you’re hustling to catch a flight, the kiosk is a godsend. It doesn’t just eliminate long line waits—how do I inevitably pick the understaffed check-in line behind the nice couple planning their fiftieth-anniversary around-the-world trip?—it’s empowering. You lose the human touch, but when you have to move fast, the “new” automation—at least when it works—can make flying a whole lot less grueling and stressful.
It’s no longer just about cutting labor costs, or shifting them to passengers forced to pay in wasted time holding on endless telephone trees. Today’s information technology supports a whole new level of automation, one that still saves airlines cash but also lets halfway-savvy passengers help themselves online and at the airport. Add to kiosks plenty of other new technologies like travel software applications for tracking flights in real time, airport guides that electronically walk you through the terminal bedlam to your gate or to the closest watering hole, apps that monitor security-line wait times, and radio-frequency bag tags that track the precise location of your luggage as it moves along the journey, not to mention digital check-in and boarding and the wonder of Wi-Fi at 37,000 feet. Call it DIY air travel, except for the actual flying.
The self-service journey has happened fast—maybe too fast for some. As noted, costly-to-handle paper tickets disappeared in less than a decade, for example, but not every flier—my elderly aunt included—joyfully embraces the brave new world of downloading and flashing barcodes on smart phone screens at boarding gate scanners. And there can be false economies. A pet peeve: Is it really faster to make busy TSA name-checkers squint at your electronic boarding pass on your iPhone screen (the pass still needs to be scanned, verified, and compared to your ID) than to simply print out the bloody thing at the kiosk in the airport lobby and hand it to the officer along with your driver’s license?
And despite its huge promise, automated self-service doesn’t always work, period. Just ask Virgin America, one of the world’s most tech-friendly airlines, based in San Francisco, up the highway from Silicon Valley where hardly anybody “calls” an airline. When its web-based reservations system crashed in 2011, Virgin’s tech-savvy clientele reportedly waited up to an hour on the telephone to make or change reservations or to check in. With high expectations for technology, don’t expect much patience from the young and tech-reliant, either; remember the guy in New Orleans arrested for a violent assault on a balky Continental Airlines check-in kiosk.
2. THE DREAMLINER
Even with the initial safety angst over Boeing’s new 787 superplane, a new generation of airplanes using innovative technologies—put aside the 787’s battery problems—promises passengers a better flying experience soon. Beaten down by hard times after 9/11, traditional US airlines initially stopped buying new airplanes. Just stopped. By late in the decade, their fleets were aging—according to Airfleets.net, about 12 to 16 years old on average compared to about nine years at Air France and KLM, 10 to 11 years at Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines, or Qantas, and six to seven years at Emirates and Singapore. By 2013, Delta was still flying more than a dozen DC-9 jets inherited from Northwest that averaged close to 35 years old.
Deferring aircraft replacement saved money in the short term, but aging fleets bore their own cost consequences, like higher fuel and maintenance expense. When United bought 50 new-generation long-haul jets in December 2009 to replace older 747s and 767s, for example, it projected 40 percent savings in lifetime maintenance costs per seat-mile for each retired plane, and fuel-cost reductions of some 33 percent. So when industry finances began to improve, replacing aircraft—en masse in some cases—climbed corporate agendas. In July 2011, months before it went bankrupt, American announced the biggest airplane order in history—460 new jets, plus options for another slew of about the same number—and other carriers went shopping too.
New passenger-friendly airplanes promise to meet the imperatives of lower operating costs, but the leaps of technology on which they rely are just that—true leaps of both engineering and manufacturing processes that, as the Boeing 787 saga attests, can be much tougher to execute than anyone expects. Hyped as the “Dreamliner,” no less, the plane took a decade to build, arrived three years late at the end of 2011, and suffered what may be the worst US market debut of any airship since the Hindenburg. After a full-on, pop-the-evacuation-slides emergency landing in Japan, regulators had to ground the whole fleet to investigate what the NTSB called “very serious safety concerns” related to battery overheating. (The planes’ powerful lithium-ion batteries help provide the copious electricity—the plane generates enough to power some 500 homes—that lets fuel-saving components substitute for heavier, traditional mechanical systems.)
Once eventually back in the air, the Dreamliner won’t be any less crowded, offer more legroom, or make pricey snack packs more satisfying, but two unseen improvements should enhance physical comfort: a lower “virtual” altitude and higher cabin humidity. Both are made possible by the plane’s innovative construction—it uses carbon-fiber composite sections, not the typical sheets of airplane aluminum that are vulnerable to metal fatigue. (Airbus’s “new-generation” long-range A350, due in service as soon as late next year, takes the same approach to airframe materials.) Passengers should feel more like they’re sitting in a Denver high-rise than in a desert-mountain pass. Cabin humidity will also be higher than the Saharan levels of most planes—15 to 16 percent humidity is promised—and a new gas filtration system removes, ahem, odors and “gaseous contaminants.”
At least as noticeable as the physical improvement will be the psychic comforts of the interior of the new planes, the feng shui. For a decade, teams of psychologists worked with Boeing’s “director of passenger satisfaction” on the challenge: how to improve the flying experience while still letting their airline customers squeeze in as many bodies and burn as little fuel as possible. The physical dimensions of an airplane cabin can’t change that much, so designers tried to change passengers’ perception of their spatial environment—to leave them a little less stressed, more relaxed, and even less bored. Boeing’s aim to “reconnect passengers to flying” is an unabashed throwback to an earlier day when the air journey still held a little wonder.
Start with the 787 windows—they’re about 65 percent larger than on “standard” jets, another feature made possible by the strength of the plane’s carbon-composite construction, and they’re positioned higher, at the passengers’ eye level. Forget staring at the mindless sitcom rerun on the seatback screen; welcome to the sky and earth and clouds. And electronic virtual window shades darken the windows through five levels with the touch of a button by activating an electro-chromatic film, without entirely blocking out the view. Inside the cabin, light levels and ceiling colors can be adjusted across an almost infinite spectrum, say to mimic the blue sky, or a dawn or sunset on long-haul flights across time zones. At the plane’s main entry door, a spacious foyer is intended to emphasize the welcoming transition from the cramped, dark jetway, a psychological transit from the “compression” of the boarding line to—dare we say it?—the “magic” of flight.
Airlines think passengers will eat it up, ordering 850 planes before even the first test flight. So don’t be surprised to see—eventually at least—a Dreamliner surcharge.
3. NEXTGEN
It’s an awkward moniker, but this monster federal program promises to drag air traffic control out of the post–World War II era, reducing delays, improving safety, and even shortening flights by letting planes fly closer together and on more direct routes. NextGen is really an umbrella for a bunch of new tools and technologies meant to change the way air traffic is managed. The basic idea is to transfer much of the job from controllers in darkened rooms watching radar screens to a satellite-based system using GPS that gives pilots in the cockpit more control and responsibility for safe and efficient routing. The package includes lots of other improvements—new digital communications and data networking, precision weather forecasting, and new airport systems.
Truth be told, not many folks fully understand all the pieces of this huge air traffic rework, how they’re supposed to fit together, precisely what it will cost, or who exactly will pay for what. Cost estimates approach $40 billion, with taxpayers picking up most of the tab and airlines the rest. But suffice it to say that NextGen is, as the Washington Post put it, the “most expensive and complicated transportation project since the launch of the interstate highway system.”
Putting aside the surfeit of NextGen hype, though, the problem it aims to fix is very real: an obsolete US air traffic control system that is operating at, and sometimes beyond, its limits. Controllers tracking the 7,000 or so aircraft over the United States at any given time on any given day still use radar, a rudimentary technology for locating things that is light-years behind even the $199 GPS navigation system plugged into your car’s dashboard outlet.
Before your eyes glaze over, understand that NextGen—particularly its GPS component—should make a concrete difference for fliers, speeding travel time and cutting delays. While delays have already dropped significantly since the forgettable summer of 2000, that’s at least partly due to fewer airline flights and padded flight schedules. The reprieve won’t last forever, though; even as airlines keep a tight reign on capacity, economic growth spurs profitable demand and air traffic continues its long, slow rebound. The FAA optimisticaly predicts that in a decade or so, a billion passengers will crowd US airspace, 37 percent more in 2024 than flew in 2011. So if you thought delays used to be bad …
Here’s how NextGen promises to help: Consider a raft of planes converging on a fog-bound hub at rush hour. Air traffic controllers’ top safety priority is just to “maintain separation” between them—or, as normal humans might say, to keep them from crashing into each other and plummeting to earth in horrifying fireballs. If things get overloaded and controllers start wondering where DL 432 went or why UA 92 is heading to the wrong runway, they have to slow everything down, imposing a ground delay or airspace-flow program that meters flight activity. Sometimes, the FAA has to just blow the whistle—putting a “ground stop” on all flights to the overloaded airports or regions until things get less crazy. More commonly, planes are directed to zigzag between virtual “waypoints” in the sky at precisely staggered altitudes—think of a sailboat tacking upwind—so that traffic controllers can be sure they know where every airplane is headed in the three-dimensional chess game known as the National Airspace System.
Hopscotching and zigzagging between waypoints burns extra fuel, emits greenhouse gases, delays flights, and sometimes triggers a cascade of further downstream delays. And it invariably lengthens the actual distance you have to fly to get to your destination—you notice it most on what should be short hops in congested metro regions. An extreme example cited by the airlines in 2007 Senate testimony: flights between Boston and Washington in the congested Northeast corridor that had to be routed via western New York and central Pennsylvania, lengthening the intercity journey by 35 percent. And that’s when radar and other control technologies are working reliably. Radar sometimes breaks down, reflects “ghost” images, or tracks flocks of birds. Remote mountaintop radar antennas can be tough to maintain. NextGen technologies should eventually let airlines abandon the old jagged waypoint-to-waypoint “highways in the sky” in favor of near-direct routings.
At the heart of the NextGen fix is a piece of techno-magic known as—it’s a mouthful—automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (everybody says “ADS-B”). What that does, in essence, is let air traffic controllers see precisely and almost instantly where your plane is—by using satellite-based GPS surveillance. Radar can’t do that. One reason is that long-range radar dishes take about 12 seconds to rotate, 5 or 6 seconds for radar near airports, so controllers can see only where your plane used to be 12 seconds ago—that’s a mile away when you’re flying at 300 miles per hour. ADS-B should update your plane’s position at least every single second, and GPS will show more precisely how fast you’re moving and where you’re headed.
And get this: Pilots in their cockpits will see it all too—their own console screens showing the same picture of the airspace and other planes around them that air traffic controllers sitting on the ground see on their screens. It’s all designed to make it easier for planes to see and avoid one another—so they can get where they’re going directly, and so more of them can fit safely into congested airspace without the time-consuming “safety cushion” of extra separation and airborne maneuvering that today’s less-precise system requires. By 2020, the FAA expects the improvements to cut delays 38 percent and at the same time save 1.4 billion gallons of fuel. At least, that’s the theory.
Even though the need for it is close at hand, NextGen truly does mean next generation, and much of the core hardware won’t be in place for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, the FAA has, to put it politely, a blemished history of implementing big-bang new technologies, especially those involving complex new software. It comes as little surprise, therefore, that two government watchdogs, the GAO and DOT’s Inspector General, have warned of costly delays in the program. In April 2012, DOT’s Inspector General concluded rather drily that “it is uncertain when the [NextGen] programs will start delivering benefits …”; in September, it was “come the promised land, when NextGen is in place.” In 2012 the GAO found that more than a third of the program’s 30 key contracts were already over budget, with half of them behind schedule. The FAA still speaks hopefully about a “goal” of getting the whole whizz-bang program up and running by 2025—they call this vision “Destination 2025.” But consider the fact that, as late as the mid-1990s, the FAA was the world’s largest consumer of old-style vacuum tubes.
4. T-2 AND THE YOGA ROOM
Airports aren’t always happy places. People arrive stressed. They’re leaving something or someone; they’re about to embark on something new; they’re rushing to make a flight, a meeting, a deadline; they’re being scanned and maybe frisked—and they know why. Venues of anguished leave-takings and joyous reunions, they’re also gateways to the new normal of air travel, often the first corridors of travel angst. In response, airports have historically aspired to be, from a functional standpoint, largely invisible. The mission of these highly ordered systems was to move passengers through the pipeline to their planes like clockwork, without drama.
At the same time, though, mega-airports were monuments to modernity—witness LAX’s retro-futuristic “Theme” building or the Saarinen terminals at JFK and Dulles. From Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf, airports have become “statements,” testaments to having arrived on the world stage. The new Beijing International Terminal 3 is not only the world’s largest airport but, by some measure, the world’s largest building of any kind, an edifice twice the square footage of the Pentagon. Air travelers traversing such vast marble icons seem diminutive, almost afterthoughts.
Today that vision of the monumental “aerodrome” is starting to be eclipsed, at least in the United States, by a new idea of the airport’s role in the air-travel journey. Leading airports are trying to pick up the slack in the passenger experience, reintroducing a little humanity, civility, and even fun. They’re motivated partly by money—happier, relaxed passengers spend more, park more, and fly more—and partly by civic pride and a sense of responsibility to their communities. Attracting a new international flight can bring huge benefits to the local economy—Denver projected $142 million a year for a new daily Boeing 747 flight to Asia. And most are creatures of municipal government; their bosses answer to local elected politicos and their constituents, after all.
Add a simple fact of aviation life after September 11: airports are where travelers often spend the bulk of their journey, more time than in the air—it’s known as “dwell time.” There’s plenty of it to spare at the world’s mega-hubs. A Dallas-Fort Worth airport survey of 1,600 travelers at the end of 2008 found that departing passengers spent about 95 minutes between the time they cleared security until they boarded their plane; nearly a quarter of them spent more than two hours waiting. For travelers connecting to other flights at the hub, the wait was 134 minutes on average. At ultrabusy London Heathrow, one study found an average total dwell time of 161 minutes—nearly three hours. Long dwell times aren’t only at huge hubs, though. Even the nice, new airport in Bismarck, North Dakota, with less than a dozen daily airline flights and fewer than 600 passengers a day on average in 2011, cautions fliers to arrive at least 90 minutes early.
But who’s complaining about the end of sprints to the boarding gate? For airlines, the extra time ensures that even once-a-year “Christmas fliers” get to the gate on time, that bags have time to get tagged accurately, and presumably that check-in desks can be more tightly staffed. For airports, dwell time means cash. Air travelers have money, they’re bored, and they’re captive after the security screening—almost perfect consumers. Their $88,000 median income in 2010 far exceeded the national median income of just under $50,000. And, according to an Arbitron survey in 2007, more than two-thirds of air travelers hit the demographic sweet spot—between 25 and 54 years old, with nearly 60 percent having at least a college degree.
To access passenger wallets, retailers pay airports serious rents and a piece of the revenue action. Even before 9/11, a little See’s Candies cart in a terminal lobby at SFO grossed well over a million dollars a year. Clothing retailer Brooks Brothers caught on early to the airport-asshopping-mall; its motto: “Bad Weather Is Good for Business,” according to a New York Times story. Good, too, for the airport—it typically takes well over 10 percent of the non-food retail gross, and double that percentage from rental-car companies. Airport retail is getting even more lucrative. By 2011, fliers at large airports were shelling out an estimated $10 on average on airport purchases, not including duty-free goods. The demise of free food onboard must have made gold mines out of some airport eateries. How can you lose selling water at $3 a quart? Since 9/11 swelled “dwell time,” airport revenues from retail stores and food and beverage concessions have by some estimates jumped over 40 percent (from 2002 to 2009), according to one research study. And that’s not including airport parking and ground transportation—where the biggest chunk of passenger purchase revenue comes from.
Whether by design or default, leading US airports are becoming more than forgettable pass-throughs from the curb to the plane, or vice versa. Who else is taking care of the traveler? Since so much of the nation’s travel is concentrated in relatively few large airports—the 16 largest handle half of all US passengers and the top 25, known as “Category X” airports, serve more than two-thirds of them—a dozen or two truly passenger-friendly hubs could make a real difference in the whole country’s air travel experience.
That said, fliers aren’t likely soon to see airports, no matter how attractive, as stand-alone destinations—despite the fondest hopes of some airport entrepreneurs. More than a few high-end restaurateurs have lost their shirts trying to attract upscale diners to white-tablecloth “destination” restaurants stuck in airport terminals. (An after-dinner stroll through baggage claim, anyone?) But more and more, leading airports are becoming “real” places that, at the very least, take the edge off the air-travel experience.
Check out, for example, San Francisco International’s Terminal 2 (“T-2”), opened in 2011 as the 14-gate home of American and Virgin America.
To get to T-2, you still have to transit standard TSA security screening, but then everything changes. You emerge into a serene “recomposure zone”—heavily sound-insulated and terrazzo-floored, eerily quiet, with soaring ceilings drawing natural light from large skylights and clerestories. Soft lighting emphasizes the gently billowing, cloudlike fabric installation created by a New York artist. Stylishly upholstered platforms are positioned to let fliers re-dress and re-shoe and re-gather belongings after the usual screening indignities. Calming background sounds—not Muzak, not droning security “alerts,” more like a little sophisticated soft jazz—emanate from hidden speakers, the volume and even the tempo programmed to fit the time of day and activity level of the terminal.
Having “recomposed,” you stroll down a “street” of retailers and restaurants. Every passenger passes every concession, and antsy fliers can keep an eye on their boarding gate from every eatery. (According to the terminal’s acclaimed architect, Gensler, “passengers want to stay within 250 feet of their gate.”) The food is serious, healthy, and local—“sustainable” in the vernacular. Some of the Bay Area’s celebrated foodie outlets offer to pack you a gourmet onboard lunch that would shame any First Class microwaved product—maybe a roasted porchetta sandwich or a half slab of dry-rubbed ribs or a rotisserie chicken, and the wine bar is pouring crisp vintage Taittinger Champagne, though a little pricey at $19 a glass. To attract these premium food purveyors, the airport takes a lighter-than-normal cut of revenues—far less than the hefty portion big airports typically extract, for instance, from on-airport rental car companies (one reason airport car renters see that airport “concession recovery” surcharge on their credit card receipts). At T-2, relaxed fliers do spend more, a lot more. As of early 2012, they spent about 22 percent more on retail and food and beverage combined than they did at the airport’s other domestic terminals. By the end of 2011, the average flier at SFO spent more per capita than passengers at any other international airport in the United States, except JFK.
Think of places like T-2 as partial antidotes to the cold new world of mass air travel—like airline clubs and lounges for the elite traveler. If today’s flying demands that travelers budget extra time, places like T-2 respond with free Wi-Fi (it’s not cheap to provide), hundreds of gateside electric outlets, and workstations and elevated work counters right at the gate for last minute lap-topping.
And of course the New Age airport terminal is “green.” A monument to environmental sensitivity and sustainability, T-2 is the nation’s first LEED Gold-certified airport terminal. A special ventilation system filters the indoor air using 20 percent less energy; a direct connection to the region’s BART subway system cuts car trips; and the building uses reclaimed water for toilets. There’s high-efficiency lighting and sustainable-material terrazzo floors made of recycled glass. And perish those Earth-killing plastic bottles of designer water sold in other terminals; T-2 glorifies the humble water fountain. At SFO, “hydration stations” located past security offer, the sign says, “delicious water delivered direct from the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” Oh, and for stress, there’s the airport’s new “yoga room.” Seriously. It opens at four thirty a.m.
SFO is hardly alone in trying to transform the nowhere/everywhere twilight zone of airport “travelspace” into a real, even authentically local, experience. Enjoy Amsterdam at Schipol Airport—there’s a branch of the world-renowned Rijksmuseum, not to mention the Schipol Love Club, an establishment that advertises “hostesses … for business or pleasure” just “a stone’s throw” from the airport. Or get a Finnish sauna or “stone bath” steam treatment at Helsinki Airport. At Munich, sample the local beer at a Bavarian beer garden—it’s made in the airport’s own on-site brewery. Or tour Phoenix Sky Harbor’s 500-piece art collection that includes work assembled from local galleries and museums. Las Vegas International is famous for its thousand-plus slot machines located throughout the terminals, some near baggage-claim carousels—why waste time when you’re waiting for luggage? Not to mention the indoor putting green at Palm Beach International, an IMAX theater in Hong Kong, a “five-star” in-terminal hotel in Dubai, and even a rooftop swimming pool and Jacuzzi at Singapore’s Changi Airport.
And for the truly hassled, airports have faith. At least three-dozen of the larger US airports have chapels, now mostly interfaith. Boston’s Our Lady of the Airways, opened in 1951, may have been the first, but JFK now has four chapels side by side—Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and what is reportedly the only Jewish airport synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. At SFO, the floor of the “meditation room” incorporates a Compass Rose to help devout Muslims find Mecca.
All oases in the psychological desert of modern air travel.
5. “TRANSPARENCY” AND THE GOTCHAS
Life for everyday fliers stands to get at least a little less complicated as federal regulators keep the heat on airlines to level better with their customers about the real cost of flying. Consumerists bemoan a lack of “transparency,” but even fliers who understand and appreciate the overall value of flying can’t stand the “gotchas.”
Let’s be realistic. Airlines on their own aren’t necessarily going to champion the utmost “transparency” in all their dealings with consumers. Can they really be expected to? Telling potential ticket purchasers the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what they will ultimately have to shell out to get where they’re going—taxes, fees, and surcharges included—is bound to cut into sales, especially when fliers seeking the very cheapest fare online will take their business wherever they can save a few dollars. Why muddy—or clarify (depending on your perspective)—the sales pitch with premature, unpleasant warnings about added fees and surcharges, and caveats about cancellation or checked bags?
That leaves DOT’s designated consumer “protectors” to use their unique legal authority over “unfair or deceptive” airline practices, and they’re starting to. By 2012, DOT had issued nearly a dozen new consumer-protection rules and begun to beef up a historically overstretched, outgunned staff responsible for enforcing them. Despite some anguished industry hyperbole about how the feds were bent on reversing 35 years of deregulation, DOT’s recent push for consumer “transparency” hardly seems radical. Seeing that air travelers get the clearest possible information, in a timely fashion, about what they’ll have to pay (in part so they can better comparison-shop) is mighty hard to see as creeping Socialism. The Federal Trade Commission did much the same in December 2012 when it warned hotel chains about potentially deceptive “drip pricing” tactics—where unavoidable “resort fees” or “convenience fees” aren’t disclosed in a timely manner to hotel guests checking advertised room prices. Nobody’s telling airlines to dispense free snacks or provide more legroom or to charge less, after all.
In fact, it’s not in DOT’s bureaucratic DNA to get too aggressive about dictating the way the airline industry markets and advertises its product, whether that’s due to a commendable reluctance to tell airlines how to run their hellishly complex businesses or just an exaggerated fear of political and industry blowback. Today’s get-tougher approach to consumer transparency is a predictable response to the last decade’s evolution of the airline-passenger commercial equilibrium. Everyday consumers simply need more help in the challenging world of ancillary fees, surcharges, and ever-fewer competitors wielding super-sophisticated technology to reach into their wallets. Bound to champion the public interest in aviation, DOT could only try to help consumers navigate the new terrain.
Not everyone agrees. Even a seemingly commonsense new rule—that airlines must make clear to passengers upfront the full amount they will actually have to pay to fly, including taxes and mandatory fees—drew heavy industry flak. So did other DOT rules requiring airlines to warn more clearly of bag fees and carry-on allowances and, a particular irritant for some, to give customers 24 hours to comparison-shop without penalty.
To many airlines, these rules didn’t seem like common sense at all. Several quickly sued, as noted, and anti-tax legislators were enlisted to try to roll back the full-fare rule in Congress on the theory that regulators were trying to “hide” the tax burden (what Spirit referred to as “the Government’s Cut”) from a presumed-to-be outraged public. In fact, the rule does not bar separately displaying taxes as long as the total fare, including those taxes, is clear and more prominent.
There was a fusillade of additional arguments, too. Some asked why airlines should have to be more open upfront about total prices than other businesses—like the beloved telephone companies—are in billing their customers. Then there was a claim—later rejected by a federal appeals court in July 2012—that requiring the “total fare” disclosure would abridge airlines’ “free speech” rights to show how high taxes on air travelers had become. Industry-supportive economists weighed in too, arguing that the new fare disclosure rule would somehow “burden” US air carriers to the tune of more than one billion dollars a year and cost 12,000 industry jobs by raising prices and depressing demand. The litigant airlines appealed to the Supreme Court to protect their commercial free expression, but some thought their real beef was less lofty—that ticket-buyers might get sticker shock if they knew earlier in their purchase process the “real” total cost of their journey.
Debate over the new transparency rules goes on, but they’re largely coming into effect. That said, regulating more “transparency” may not be the optimal solution; ultimately, it could prove unnecessary and inflexible in an industry where intense competition has delivered extraordinary consumer value. And airlines fairly ask how much “extra” price disclosure burden they should be required to shoulder compared to other consumer retail businesses. But for now, for ordinary consumers trying to navigate the increasing complexity of fares, fees, and myriad new charges, reasonable rules may be the only realistic way to help them get a fair shot.
6. RANDOM ACTS
It’s not that airline folks are cruel or uncaring. Some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet work for America’s airlines—and that’s not a wisecrack, it’s true. But with nearly two million fliers and more than 25,000 US commercial flights every day, they’re trying to hold the line in a high-pressure super-securitized mass travel system that depends on standardization, routine, and efficiency. There’s just not much time or space for empathy, sympathy, and individual kindness.
OK, but does it all have to be quite so dehumanized, a place where the tragedy of a Carol Gotbaum is nobody’s fault? Not always. There are moments of humanity in airline travel, random acts of kindness—the gate agent who manages to find an open seat for a “lap infant” without a ticket, a First Class flier whom someone saw trading his seat with a soldier returning home from Afghanistan, a flight attendant who finds a few seconds to chat with an elderly gentleman traveling alone. Or the air traffic controllers who in April 2012 briefly shut down the country’s twentieth busiest airport, LaGuardia, to save a stray puppy who had escaped from her Delta Airlines transport crate and wandered onto the tarmac. Some airlines are starting to get it too. Virgin America, for instance, lowered the height of the check-in counters at its hub to reduce the sense of barrier to its “guests,” while airport agents for an Asian carrier step out from behind their podiums to welcome passengers and take their tickets. And, credit where credit is due, US airlines overall are improving their government-measured performance for on-time arrivals, mishandled bags, and cancellations.
Is there hope for a more humane kind of flying experience? Hard to say, but at least there’s the story, first reported by consumer travel writer Christopher Elliot, of Mark Dickinson, a traveler who was living a nightmare in January 2011. His two-year-old grandson lay near death in Colorado and he was desperate to catch the next Southwest flight from Los Angeles to say good-bye. Stuck in a snaking security screening line, though, Dickinson couldn’t convince officials to let him jump the queue, so he waited, and waited, as his flight’s departure time passed. Finally through security, he ran in his socks to the boarding gate, praying the flight had been delayed. It had been—held for 12 minutes by the plane’s captain, who had learned of Dickinson’s plight from the passenger’s wife’s urgent call begging the airline to hold the plane. Standing at the boarding gate waiting for this one last passenger, the pilot said simply: “They can’t go anywhere without me and I wasn’t going anywhere without you.”
The act of kindness quickly made headlines around the globe—from London’s Daily Mirror to Sydney’s Australian. A great story, but therein lies the problem: an act of simple humanity in commercial air travel was big, big news.