Air Travel: How The Hell Is This Our New Normal?
I returned to my garden this week worn out. After a long drive north to a speaking engagement, but an even longer flight and overnight experience south to a conference destination an equal distance away, I began an early morning weeding session this morning and let my thoughts wander into what the actual hell has happened to air travel in the space of two short decades.
For those who have never seen the inside of a private jet; or for those who turn right, not left, when they board an aircraft, the experience of commercial flying today can only be described as a tragicomedy in three acts.
Pat down. Sit down. Stuff down the memories of how things used to be.
O Washington! O Lincoln! Where did we go wrong?!?
Flying The [Un]Friendly Skies
Best to forget the genuine smiles. The customer service. The full-fare vouchers they offered us when a flight was occasionally oversold. (How we relished those golden opportunities in our threadbare twenties!) Now we wait quietly and accept the satire graciously. We get where we are going with no connection to how we wanted to do it. Or how we paid to do it.
And between the check-in and [eventual] landing –– we nod and smile and take our camera out of our backpack for this security checkpoint, and our shoes off for that security checkpoint and nod and smile again when we are rudely barked at to keep our cameras in and our shoes on and why the hell would we be doing anything else?
Nod and smile. Nod and smile. Dear God. Nod and smile.
The only ones having any fun here are on the screens.
Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others
If you are lucky enough to board the airplane, then you must then squarely face the poor life choices that brought you to this moment. Here, an experience once thought of as exciting and [literally] uplifting for the everyday man has turned into a disturbing snapshot of haves and have-nots, and your place in the have-nottery.
And it’s gone far beyond First Class and the rest of us. Or even Expense Account and the rest of us. Contentious strata have materialized in the wider world of Economy, where tight seating in 1997 has turned into three or four categories of how tight do you want it? Will you pay for it? Does the idea of being able to move your knees during the flight supersede the need to pay your electric bill this month?
Erase from your memory the days of bulkhead seats available for young mothers with babies — unless they happen to have a spare 120+ bucks to throw at the problem – as of course most young mothers do.
Free yourself of ‘free’ exit rows for six foot five dads who tried to book early to secure some measure of comfort (and still have four other seats yet to pay for).
Taking the edge off when you can find it helps. Even in a Starbucks (gotta love Heathrow!)
Forget the Frills. I’d Settle For Just Getting There.
As I boarded my latest delayed flight and caught a glimpse of the champagne glasses filled for Executives and Upgrades and who-the-hell-can-afford-to-send-their-two-young-children-First-Classers, I admit, I had a moment.
And the moment might have ended as I busied myself with negotiating invisible middle-class space for my carry-on and knees – except that we didn’t take off.
Instead, we sat on the tarmac during the dinner hour without even a glass of water for 90 minutes until the pilot cried Uncle, or rather “operational issues”, and we all got off the plane and began another ordeal of begged late-night crummy hotels and $12 food vouchers for a pretzel and a coffee dinner at Auntie Anne’s.
Wait, scratch that. My ticket evidently didn’t qualify for the pretzel.
My seat companion cried Uncle too – over a much-anticipated tournament he’d planned to attend with his son. The trip had already been shortened the day before by one cancelled flight, and now on the second, his course was obvious – give up.
He was dressed so beautifully. Like the old days when flying was special. His son was my age, and he told me with a handsome smile, “don’t get old, it’s not fun.” No fun for him certainly. He had to once again negotiate the 80 miles back home from the airport. No flight. No tournament. No son. All dressed up and no where to go.
But damn he looked good amongst a sea of spandex and sweatpants and is-that-man-seriously-wearing-his-pajamas?
Hours later, shuffling off to a begged hotel (too-recently experienced in April), I left a colleague bound for Toronto sitting forlornly in an empty 10pm terminal. He’d been on hold with customer service for eighty minutes. “Save yourself.” he joked. He didn’t know it but he was still two overnights away from his own bed.
Smile and nod. Smile and nod.
Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?
And so we do. We have no recourse. No private jets to charter while we admonish lesser beings in the saving of the planet. No rabid lawyers on speed dial to sort our Carbon Credit Indulgences or recoup precious money lost in missed connections or missed vacation hours. No assistants to rebook us while we take some self-care time in the airport lounge.
We take the crumbs offered and tightly smile, knowing well that the person offering is probably overworked and definitely overwhelmed and denied the tools they need to do their jobs properly.
Our desire to be kind is used against us. Be kind in this moment now. There is no one with any power to truly make this better. You’ll only upset everyone, and anything above a fierce whisper will surely attract the attention of the humourless TSA anyway.
Nope. Wait till you eventually get home and the fury cools, so you can choose from a list of acceptable questions to send a chatbot, or have a stilted conversation with an agent in a country 4000 miles away. Perhaps they’ll give you $50 vouchers towards future nightmare travel during non-blackout dates.
That won’t even buy leg room in an exit row these days.
Instead we direct our snark through pointless social media posts that make us feel better. Or do they?
And BTW – Clothing Is For Vain People
When the no-frills-we’re-all-in-this-together Southwest Airlines becomes the carrier with the biggest frills — namely two free checked suitcases — we’ve officially got a serious problem on our hands.
Who could have guessed (apart from Southwest’s prescient CEO in 1971) that the once obvious necessity of packing more than three pairs of underwear, a jacket, and an extra pair of shoes for two weeks in Milwaukee to see your parents was a luxury worth an extra $70? For you, your spouse, and your three kids. Legroom? No, I’ll just take the underwear, thank you.
If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be laughable.
Voyage of the Damned
Am I wrong to set these thoughts down? After all, from speaking engagements to conferences to garden touring, a great deal of my professional career relies on an once-established framework clearly breaking down. I often say that I am not paid to speak as much as I am paid to endure the travel required to get there.
Those of us who know that Zoom is a poor substitute for one-on-one engagement with our fellow human beings have learned to drive to the limits of our check engine lights. And when GoogleMaps says “no freaking way are you driving that” we gird our loins and set our minds on the eventual pleasure of the destination – when we can finally get there.
You can’t do this on Zoom. Andy Pulte, Dan Benarcik, Me and Irvin Etienne at this year’s Perennial Plant Association Symposium in Asheville, North Carolina.
Or this: Me, Scott Beuerlein, Carol Reese, Kyra Back and Allen Bush at the PPA trivia night.
Or this: An after hours tipple with podcaster Leslie Harris at Great Dixter, East Sussex, UK.
Or indeed this: Charles Hawes, Anne Wareham and I share a bench and a moment at their garden in Wales.
The thing is, the flight used to be vaguely pleasurable for the everyday man – no champagne required. We simply asked for kindness, value for money, and a genuine respect for a customer making a big investment.
I remember. And I ain’t that old. – MW