Dec
27
The killjoy of flying
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9
Ten years ago I boarded a flight from Washington, D.C., to New York, and while we were taking off the plane lost an engine cowling.
It was kind of exciting. I was the first one to notice it was loose, and tried to tell the flight attendant, but she was too busy shooing me back into my seat to listen to me. I was determined not to shout or betray panic, so I simply said, “The engine cowling is coming off. We need to return to the airport.”
“Sir, please return to your seat,” she said.
“I will. But look at the engine and tell the pilot what you see.”
“Sit down!”
I sat down. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to be arrested, either. Creating a disturbance on a commercial passenger flight was grounds for arrest even before 9/11.
Next I tried to pass the message forward, figuring someone in the front row could argue with the flight attendant while remaining buckled in place. But the people in the next row started yelling, and the cowling tore off altogether at this point. The flight attendant deigned to look at this point and notified the pilot, who turned around and landed.
I’ve never bothered to tell this story beyond that point before, but what happened next is that we returned to the terminal at Dulles airport and were told we would have to wait two or three hours before the next opportunity to get to New York.
My companion was a high-powered vice president of a company I used to work for, who wanted me as a consultant to accompany her on a sales call to a publisher. The idea was to fly to New York, take a meeting, and fly home. Waiting two or three hours was not an option. But the airline was altogether unhelpful. We squeezed onto a rival airline’s flight, arriving in plenty of time, and presumably the high-powered vice president gave the original airline hell later.
Have you ever noticed that everybody has an airline story?
This comes to mind after hearing about the meltdown in service at United Airlines, which made the world’s second largest airline the common carrier that stole Christmas for some of its customers.
United has more than 6,000 pilots, but that’s down from nearly 10,000 a few years ago, and sometimes that’s a problem. The FAA only lets pilots fly so many hours a month, and weather delays can cause crews to max out, making them unavailable until the next month. That’s what happened to UAL this week.
It started Sunday when gale force winds swept Chicago O’Hare, still one of the busiest airports in the world and mostly because of United, which is headquartered in Chicago. From Sunday to Wednesday the airline canceled more than 600 flights, according to the Chicago Tribune and the Reuters news agency, including more than 300 on Christmas. United said Thursday it hoped to finally be back to normal operation, but I noticed a deicing notice at Denver International Airport, so a declaration of normality may have been a tad premature.
Bad weather, of course, is difficult to plan for. An airline with hubs at Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and Dulles knows it will sometimes encounter snow, strong winds, freezing rain or other problems, but it doesn’t know how many blizzards it will get or when. You have to have enough flight crews to cover emergencies, or you can work with fewer crews and the risk that your customers will occasionally get hosed by a service meltdown.
Blizzards are bad example of bad weather because other kinds of bad weather that occur far more frequently are also capable of snarling airline traffic. Lightning strikes on the runway, for example, once canceled my United flight from Dulles to San Francisco. I was told to go home and come back tomorrow. I did. But the next day there were still problems, and by the time I got to San Francisco there were no flights to Honolulu. By the time I was given a hotel and transportation voucher, there was no transportion, and I spent the night in fitful sleep in the terminal while the TVs blared. By morning I was ready to confess to being a member of al-Quaida. Waterboarding is nothing compared to the CNN Airport Channel.
The point is that it doesn’t take a gale or a blizzard to wreak havoc with flight schedules. What wrought havoc this time was merely some lightning on the runway. Bad weather abounds around the calendar. United saves a lot of money by not any longer having about 3,000 extra pilot positions, but there is a considerable cost to its customers.
American Airlines and Southwest Airlines also have hubs in Chicago but their schedules were hardly affected at all by comparison. The chief executive officer of United is a former oil executive who never flew commercial, and I always wonder at times like this how much of a flier’s pain he is capable of feeling. Not that I blame him – I’m at a stage of my life where if I can afford to fly first class I do — but I’ve flown United a lot over the year, as most Hawaii residents and visitors have, without often getting a sense that the airline is run for the customers.
(Feel free to write if you had a sensational experience on UAL or a lousy one on another carrier.)
P.S. USA Today reports today that bad weather and air traffic congestion now cause fewer flight delays than the airlines’ own problems with short-staffing, a remarkable fact when one considers that flight delays reached a record level in 2007.
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