I knew it was a mistake to leave the house and try to visit the nation’s capital. When I got to the airport, the airline canceled my flight to Washington, D.C. I almost suggested that because I had honored my end of the bargain by turning up punctually without compressed gases, the airline, having failed to supply the airplane, might honor its end of the deal by giving me a refund. But I knew the answer.
I cannot name the airline for legal reasons. However, I can say that whenever I try to fly American Airlines, I feel like a fox that has caught its paw in a rusty trap. It’s a choice between agonizing death or gnawing off my paw, which is holding my wallet. Of course, I realize that American Airlines is not a state-owned company, but it does carry the brand, and I am one of those 20th century people who, when seeing the word “American,” thinks, “It’s modern, it works, and there’ll be food, plenty of it.”
American has the same problem as United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, which is the American problem writ large in the sky. The big carriers are protected and pampered, subsidized and supersized, over-regulated and overpriced. They are more concerned with appeasing the regulators than satisfying the customers. They are too big to fail but also too big to function, so they fail us all the time.
Their passengers still reflect local character. The man who tried to storm the cockpit of a Southwest Airlines plane was stomped to death by his fellow passengers. The regulars on my JetBlue commuter run from Boston to New York sip their Dunkin’ just as they like it, in thin-lipped silence. Recently, gnawing my foot at LaGuardia Airport on another futile attempt to get home, I watched the boarding of a Spirit Airlines flight to Orlando. The passengers wore traditional Floridian costumes — outsize shorts for sir, thongs for madam, vests for both. Everyone was drinking and having fun despite the delay, and when boarding commenced, they all ran up to the desk together and stormed the plane without scanning their tickets while two policemen waved their arms and shouted.
It is a cardinal rule of American life that you get what you pay for — on the ground, anyway. In 2018, the last year for which statistics are available and anyone gave a damn, not one American airline was in the world’s top 25 cheapest carriers. It wasn’t all budget carriers in Asia, either: Etihad, Qantas, Emirates, Air India, and Virgin Australia were all there. In the air, we pay more and get less than the Europeans. They may have no air-conditioning, but they’ve managed to deregulate the air. While Americans sit on their bags and wait for connections at squalid and crowded hubs such as O’Hare and JFK, Europeans fly nonstop, spoke to spoke. They spend the time they’ve saved working on their tans and drinking coffee in fancy cafes. It’s insufferable.
Europe’s budget airlines are as no-frills as a Floridian’s thong, and their budgets are stretched similarly tight. The savings shrink when you buy extras, such as a numbered seat, so you don’t have to sprint from the bus to the plane like it’s the raid on Entebbe. But you get there quicker and cheaper, and the budget airlines’ safety records are no worse than the legacy carriers.
Cheap flights were pioneered in the United States in the 1970s by airlines like People Express Airlines. Today, foreigners are doing what they think is the American way, while Americans endure what they believe is the European way: monopolistic and costly, with poor customer service. You pays your money, and you gets no choice.
I tried again a week later. I made it as far as Washington, D.C., but then my connection was canceled. The steel jaws closed, and the wallet opened. I got home at 2 a.m. feeling like the pig who caught his balls in a trap: disgruntled.
I whiled away my enforced vacation at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport by reflecting on Reagan’s battle with the air traffic control unions and what, if he wanted to take Nancy away for the weekend, he might suggest now.
Deregulate. Expand regional airports. Let local competition reduce prices and restore quality. Let foreign airlines bid for domestic slots on spoke-to-spoke routes. Let the dinosaurs join TWA and Pan Am in the great hangar in the sky if they can’t cut it. Give people free coffee and pretzels, give them a mojito if you’re flying to Miami, and give them the cold shoulder if it’s New England. This used to be the American way. It still is if you stay at a motel or a small hotel. If, that is, you’re able to get there. I would have driven, but the gas was too expensive.
