Opinion/Editorial
FLYING LOW
The state of flying today is dominated by an ever-increasing condition of full-blooded misery. The airplanes are mostly late, and the crews are lying about why they are running late. Everything is so jammed due to a long-planned, and now implemented “fill everything at one hundred percent” from aircraft to airport and more, philosophy. The arms of all the airports are filled with crummy fast food places and junk shops. It’s like in the movie Blade Runner, or like the back streets of Hong Kong. It is just awful.
At Seattle’s airport, most bathrooms have only two stalls. The buses taking passengers from the car rental facility to the airport are crammed and deliver the ‘do it yourself luggage’ bus to the baggage claim downstairs! And it’s a three-story climb up to departure. The rental car parking lot is loaded with spikes. Walk with great care. Aboard the aircraft, the crews serve jack shit. On a three-hour flight maybe a cup of coffee, or a coke, that’s it. There are only two attendants now on a 737, and one spends all his or her time upfront with 1st class. The new interiors are just concerned with jamming in the maximum number of people, and there is no way anyone could ever get out in an emergency. To top it off, everyone is mad. The passengers are deadpan and straight-faced. Security has that ‘go ahead and make my day’ look. The airline crews are short clipped and stay away from the passengers.
What have we done to ourselves? At what point will people just say enough is enough? I don’t give one damn anymore whether Boeing fixes its planes or goes out of business. Too bad, you build crap stuff and so does the other company in Europe…and you do it because you are a monopoly. Good-bye to United and American one day soon, I hope. They deserve to go and I don’t care if I have to drive. These people working in that business now are truly awful and I can only write it here because at the airports of America, and aboard the planes, there is no free speech…just a willing bunch of cretins waiting to arrest what used to be called passengers. Now, they are perspective inmates. I think a ton of Americans feel like I do, but they will say nothing.
How about the new ‘entertainment’ systems on these planes? Have you flown one of the new tiny-seated things and had the television screens drop down to go into advertising mode? They also provide a safety video that absolutely no one watches. Those safety presentations once thought so vital to everyone’s safety on an airliner, have gone the way of notifications taped to the ends of electrical extension cords. Instead of real safety training, the people flying today are getting ‘proper legal notification.’ Oh, you have to bring your own entertainment device, by the way. Your smartphone or some version of an iPad is all but required. Then you have to download the proper airline app. Then you have to figure out how to use the app. Good luck. WiFi is available for twelve bucks an hour aboard American. Yes, you read that correctly, the WiFi that is almost universally available for free in coffee shops and restaurants and libraries across the globe costs twelve dollars an hour on a plane.
Not that many years ago flying was actually fun. The airline employees were all the result of real competition for many sought-after jobs, and happy to do what it was they used to do (like serve great food, smile and help with just about anything). The planes were bigger on the inside back then so you could move around and enjoy meeting other passengers. Now, everyone is mostly silent, angry and squashed together, just waiting to get the hell out of the craft. It is hard to imagine going to an airport to watch airplanes take off and land, but that was a real pastime for many families only twenty years ago, or so. When will this mode of transportation change for the better, or has our society so changed that any misery will be silently endured?
