From a site I regularly read:
The Torches Are Lit. The Mob Is Enraged.
The Rumors Are Rife...
It's Time To Beat Up Airlines. Again
Here's a fun suggestion.
Do a news search for anytime in the past year, up to mid-December of 2006. Look for all the media stories on passengers getting trapped on airliners for hours, stuck on the "tarmac" (a media term, not much used in the airline industry) and suffering the total indignity of no food, no water, no lavs.
What you'll find: almost nothing. That's because such events simply didn't happen much, except in very extreme weather conditions.
But you'd never guess it from the panting stories being churned out by any number of me-too journalists, trumpeting the sudden need for a "Passenger Bill of Rights" as a result of the alleged constant incidents of passengers getting abused by airlines intentionally caging passengers inside airplanes for hours, for no good reason except for fun.
On December 29, American Airlines really screwed up, with the result of a single airplane being stuck for eight hours on the ramp in Austin (note to journalists: that's what you call "tarmac") with no good reason. Not something to be proud of. But it was a one-off human failure event, not part of an industry-wide attack on paying passengers, as some nitwit consumerist gadflies would have you believe.
Then on Valentine's Day took place what is becoming the Bastille Day of airline consumerism - jetBlue got several airplanes stuck on the ramp for hours at JFK. That was all that was needed to light a fuse to politicians, consumerists-without-a-life, and a few journalists who tend to file the story first and research the facts later.
These two events have launched what has become a media lynch mob, ready to hang those nasty airlines for all their anti-consumer actions. The delays! The lost luggage! The cramped, full cabins! And now, the virtual temporary kidnapping of thousands of passengers by intentionally trapping them on airplanes, all for evil profit!
The folks who organized the Salem Witch Hunts would be proud.
Needless to say, the usual politicians have jumped in to protect the consumer. At the forefront is Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) who has suddenly got consumer religion, and is promising to implement new legislation to force airlines to make sure passengers are not inconvenienced when weather and, as noted below, the FAA, screw things up.
Boxer, among other things, is demanding legislation that will give passengers the "right" to get off an airplane should it be on the ground for more than a legislated number of hours. Sounds good. Sounds wonderful. And it's a typical blanket attempt to legislate something that can't be legislated.
Okay, Senator. What about when an AirTran flight is diverted to, say Colorado Springs, a location where the carrier has no staff whatsoever, when Denver's "all-weather" airport is closed due to weather? Say, along with 20 other airplanes. Say, when there is no gate available. Say, when there are real security issues, particularly for an airline that has no staff at the diversion airport?
We could go on, but this mess will unfold more in the coming weeks as the angry mobs continue to grow, egged on by media stories - a few, unfortunately, with valid points - that will feed on one another, illuminating how heartless airlines really are, facts not withstanding. We're going to hear from all sorts of sudden experts in how airlines can fix their problems. And there'll be some wonderful Congressional hearings where human passenger suffering will be detailed before oh-so-concerned committees of politicians emitting a river of crocodile tears for the benefit of the C-Span cameras.
The unfortunate part is that airlines have indeed from time to time allowed events to happen that, given some reasonable pre-planning, could have been avoided. More unfortunately, airlines are high-profile targets that politicians will paint has having no excuse for making any mistakes in handling passengers.
Furthermore, there really are some increasing cracks in the airline customer service armor that politicians in the coming weeks will exploit. The witch hunt is on, but this time there's just enough witchcraft in the airline business for politicians to exploit in order to "justify" burning a carrier or two at the stake.
The trials have already begun in the flush of media stories that would have the public believe that the airline industry is trying to turn airports into winged gulags, holding passengers against their will, trapped in airplane cabins.
But in the meantime, a couple of realities to ponder amid the din:
The Only "Epidemic" Is In Really Sloppy Reporting. Not Airline Failures. The number of events where passengers are trapped on airliners are very few, and in virtually all cases are the result of weather-related issues that would be difficult to have foreseen. Not that planning can't be better, and this is not to say that there really are some incredibly bad customer service stunts from time to time.
But it is blatant dishonesty for Boxer and the rest of her hoodlum friends in Washington to paint these events as some sort of intentional disregard for humans that she can fix with punitive legislation. As noted above, before Dec 29th, this wasn't even an issue. Two events, and, poof! we have an epidemic.
jetBlue: An Example of Excellence, Not Failure. The media and politicians' not-so-veiled implications are that what happened at JFK proves that jetBlue is intentionally and wantonly anti-consumer. In reality, that's like accusing Mother Theresa of running a numbers racket in Bombay.
jetBlue is managed at the top by probably the most moral and principled people in American business. Suddenly, it's forgotten that jetBlue brought excellence in customer service, tied to low fares, into markets where prior to their entry one needed a wire transfer from a bank in Zurich to get a ticket out of Syracuse. But to listen to the media vultures, jetBlue has fallen from grace and has gone over to The Dark Side.
Those implications are inherently dishonest. jetBlue's main problem is that it's run by humans, and humans can make mistakes. Unlike Barbara Boxer.
In this case, jetBlue apparently did not respond rapidly enough to deal with the storm. and, judging by continued cancellations days after the event, there could be some major problems with the carrier's operational recovery systems. But in the context of what that airline has done over the past five years, they'll fix it, and don't need the klutzy help of Congress. (Oh, and by the way, for the enraged muddle-brained dwellers of the consumerist peanut gallery out there: we don't do any work for jetBlue. We're just telling it like it is.)
How Come Boxer Won't Take On The FAA? Whatever consumers experienced on that Valentine's Day at JFK, it's diddly compared to what's inflicted daily on the flying public by the incompetence of the FAA's collapsing air traffic control system. In fact, much of the mess that Boxer and her cowardly fellow-travelers claim is the airlines' fault is instead the result of her failure to hold the FAA accountable. At least $8 billion in excess operational costs are passed on to the consumer annually because Marion Blakey and her predecessors couldn't get their job done, and Congress has done nothing about it, year after flight-delay-strewn year.
Face it: the FAA's continued failures to fix the ATC system is inflicting not only daily damage to consumers in the form of delays and cancellations, but is putting them at a safety risk, too. That's a whole lot more dangerous that what happened last week at JFK.
But Barbara Boxer and her Congressional friends don't have the guts to take this on. The FAA and the ATC system won't generate the high media profile that taking blind shots at airlines can bring. In short: Senator Boxer is an opportunist coward.
Airlines: Playing To Boxer's Inside Straight. To be sure, nobody can completely design an airline operation that's bullet-proof from effects of weather. But that doesn't change the fact that airlines can do a better job of focusing on the customer.
One of the major and emerging failures is the lack of service consistency across some major airlines' service systems. In fact, they're giving Ms. Boxer some great ammunition to get her inept "Rights" legislation through to a bi-partisan success...
Outsourcing. When a passenger off a flight diverted to Lincoln calls reservations and the dude in Mumbai who answers the phone thinks "Lincoln" is just a competitor to Cadillac, the airline has a problem. (A bit of a stretch, but there is a problem with some of this foreign-outsourced service being short on knowledge of the subject matter, including not having any earthly idea where, or what, Omaha is.)
Small Lift Provider Contracts. A major part of US airlines' systems today are operated by leased-in aircraft and crews, what used to be called "regional airlines." Today, these leasing companies operate the major's markets of all sizes, often alongside aircraft operated by mainline equipment.
The point is that somebody who books a seat on United Airlines is a United customer, regardless of the airplane that he or she eventually gets on. It's a United customer if he rides a UA A-320 leased from ILFC, or if he rides a United Express CRJ leased along with its crew from a small lift provider.
But consumers sometimes find that when things go wrong, that leasing contract between major and the small lift provider suddenly doesn't exist. Often majors outsource their customer service at smaller airports to these entities. The problem is that some of these small lift providers spend more time training employees to dump the lavs than on skills to deal with passengers, and when things go wrong, the service experience can be like trying to reason with a semi-literate street gang.
Customers feel shortchanged and abused when the carrier they booked ends up putting them in the hands of shiny-faced kids who don't have a clue, and sometimes don't want one.
To be sure, some SLPs do a very good job. But a few in some cases are barely a step ahead of a primate farm. There are incidents where the lazy lunks hired at near minimum-wage at some of these small lift suppliers will actually send an agent to the ticket counter 29 minutes before the departure of a half-booked 34-seat turboprop, just to tell the passengers still in line that they "missed" the flight due to "the 30-minute rule." Or where even the simple task of re-booking passengers might as well be a complex question in fractal geometry as far as the agent is concerned.
Worse, there are even incidents when a customer's been abused by a small lift provider, the contracting major airline goes into a dishonest Pontius Pilot mode, no pun intended, denying any responsibility, because, well, "that wasn't our plane. That was Trans-Deficit Regional. You'll have to call them."
No, they're going to call Senator Boxer instead.
Dumb Rules Enforced Dumbly. One of the hallmarks of bad service is relying on rules that make little sense. Like concocting a local 30-minute cut-off at a rural airport served with 30-seat turboprops. Or, when a passenger on a later flight shows up for an earlier one that has plenty of open seats, and the airline insists on hitting him up for an additional $25 bucks. Great for generating brand-loyalty.
The message is clear: airlines are under attack. Some of it is understandable, but most of it's because, after two stuck-on-the-ramp events in two months, we have a real crusade that will provide Congress a refreshing alternative to arguing about immigration or Iraq. Beating up airlines can be wonderfully bi-partisan.
Airlines: Circle The Wagons. And Start Shooting Back. The industry has the responsibility of protecting its passengers not only from the weather and from delays, but just as importantly from bad legislation. That means standing up to this stuff, and making very sure its own house is as clean as possible.
Senator Babs is coming. And she's got lots of ammunition, some of which the airline industry is providing.
(c) 2007, The Boyd Group/ASRC, Inc. All Rights Reserved
