Blogtrek

Airline Madness

I may never ride in a commercial aircraft again. There are just too many problems with it.

The problem had been brewing for years. The airlines got crowdeder, more uncomfortable, with fewer amenities, and the lines and traffic jams at airports had been getting worse and worse during the premillennium. The reason for this is evident: demand for airline travel had been steadily increasing, but the capacity has stayed the same, because no new airports were being built. By the end of the last century, the capacity had been reached.

Then along comes Planeattack, on 2001 September 11, to scare off plane travel. For a while, plane travel was nice, if you didn't mind the extra security. But plane travel has picked up again, and again the lines have grown longer and longer, and again the discomfort has gone up and the amenities have gone down, as airlines merged into a precious few monsters. And now security is getting to be a serious problem. An entire concourse of travelers at an airport is evaculated, and even a plane that had just taken off was ordered to reland and disembark, because a pair of scissors was found in a ladies' room. One misguided footballiot runs the wrong way at Hartsfield airport and the whole airport shuts down for hours. All the passengers are forced to disembark and the plane and passengers thoroughly inspected, because some "wires" are found hanging from a passenger - these turn out to be drawstrings on a jacket. And so forth and so forth the absurdities in the air and on the ground continue, with the latest being the repeated jetfighter-escorting and canceling of overseas flights suspected of harboring terrorists. Think how travelers must feel being stranded over there. I may never want to visit Europe for that reason.

Consider my mother's latest plane trip. She was to travel from Rochester to Dulles to Richmond before Yule. Her plane to Dulles gets delayed because of bad weather in Rochester, so much that she would have missed her connection, so she gets on a much later dinnertime flight from Dulles to Richmond. When she gets there, the plane gets delayed and delayed, and eventually canceled, so the airline buses her down to the airport. By car, the distance from Rochester to Richmond, 540 miles, is 9 hours. Her airplane (and bus) trip took 14 hours.

I may travel by air in the future, but it will be rare. If I have to travel from Richmond to Kansas, I will drive, even if it takes two days. I may even want to travel three days by car. If I do fly, I will insist on non-stop flights from origin to destination and drive the rest of the way. There has to be some way out of this airborne lunacy. Hope the politicians are listening.