Air Travel Hell -- a column that stands test of time
For 17 years I wrote a weekly column on magazines for the LA Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Trib. I got to spew my opinions on the issues of the day and had lots of fun.
Long before we were forced to wear masks and pretend that they were preventing us from getting covid, traveling by air was fraught with many minor annoyances. It got so bad many people forgot what a everyday miracle it was to be able to hop on a plane and fly coast to coast in five hours for $300. In 2001, when Newsweek was still Newsweek, and what it wrote about still mattered, I had some fun their cover article, “Air Hell.”
Newsweek books a flight to airline hell and back
Pittsburgh Trib
April 19, 2001
'Good morning, spoiled American crybabies. This is your Captain speaking.
'We'd like to thank you for flying It's-Not-Literally-Hell Airlines.
We apologize for that 30-minute wait on the runway and the full plane. But we're now cruising at 550 miles per hour at 33,000 feet, and we'll arrive in San Francisco in four hours.
'By the way, we have a special message for any whining news-media types with us this morning.
Flight 122 is one of 23,000 commercial flights taking off today and every day from an American airport. You're one of 650 million U.S. passengers who'll fly billions of miles this year without suffering so much as a stubbed toe.
'If this miracle of the modern age no longer impresses you, or if this $300 round-trip flight seems like a 'travel ordeal' to you, on your next cross-country trip we at It's-Not-Literally-Hell Airlines suggest you try a Greyhound Bus.'
Despite the facts presented in Newsweek 's cover story, 'Air Hell: 7 Ways to Fix Flying,' when it comes to air travel, do you sometimes get the feeling Americans are a bunch of whiners?
As Newsweek's statistics show, and as everyone who flies frequently knows, flying comes with some rare, but real, annoyances:
More commercial airplanes are now arriving and departing late or getting canceled. About 10 passengers get bumped per 1,000 boardings. About five bags per every 1,000 get mishandled.
Newsweek's sound package of advice doesn't include any solutions for bad airplane food. It urges the government to generally prevent continuation of 'the merger madness' among major airlines, which might not be a good idea if it means certain death to a struggling high-cost carrier such as US Airways.
And its 'air travel is hell' hysteria is slightly misleading, because the horrors it describes are not spread evenly throughout the system. LaGuardia Airport in New York, for example, alone causes 20 percent of all delayed flights nationwide.
But Newsweek offers many sensible steps to unclogging airport gates and skies and getting airline companies to treat their customers less like cargo and more like cattle, er, humans:
Pour more concrete for new airports and new runways, although getting them past the objections of local cranks is almost as hard as getting them approved by the government bureaucrats. Memphis took 16 years to get a new runway, and San Francisco's will take the approval of 32 agencies.
Make small private planes pay the true costs of using airports during peak hours, and auction off departure and landing times to airlines, which would smooth out rush hours.
Adopt 'free flight' technology that lets aircraft use satellite navigation gear to fly more direct routes, which saves fuel costs and takes advantage of unused airspace.
Do like Canada and Germany, and privatize our air-traffic control system by replacing the wasteful, backward, politically manipulated, $12 billion Federal Aviation Administration with an independent, nonprofit corporation.
Newsweek also says consumers should reward air carriers who reform their ways with their patronage. And it calls for airlines to treat customers better, largely by uncomplicating and humanizing the flying experience, which, despite what the media and the stand-up comics say, seems more miraculous than hellish.