Come fly the bitter skies…
The airlines want your money – however they can get it. And that will be their downfall.
I’m certain you’ve heard about at least one major airline complaining that it just isn’t profitable any more. They claim that operating and maintenance costs alone are eating up all of the profits off of your outrageously-priced ticket, and that not enough people fly regularly to counteract those costs.
I say there are two major reasons why people don’t fly regularly – and one swiftly-surfacing reason.
The first major reason is cost. Let’s face it, at today’s prices few of us can afford one plane ticket – let alone the type of “regularity” that the airlines say would help save them. You pay a small fortune for a ticket that isn’t even First Class, only to find that in your passenger class they’ve done away with seats and now pack you in five-deep like sardines. By the time you’ve crossed the continent, you could have driven and saved money on gas and hotels. Take one trip a month without anybody defraying the costs for you, and you will find that your credit card statement totals about five times the gross national product of Zimbabwe1.
The second major reason is that airlines don’t follow their own rules. I can remember the announcement that, overnight, loyal flyers’ frequent flyer miles were all going to vanish. “Use them or lose them!” said the chipper airlines. “It just costs us too much money to allow you to accumulate all of those miles we told you would never expire. So we’ve decided that they will expire – right now.” Now, the airlines sell SkyMiles credit cards that give you more frequent flyers that their ads point out “may never expire.”
The airlines routinely overbook flights, double-selling seats and then kicking passengers off when they actually all show up. They send connections off before the flight they connect to actually arrive, and then try to blame the passengers for not making it to their flight, suggesting that they have to buy a new ticket. They bounce you from counter to counter, reschedule you without notice, and ask for your paper ticket after telling you you didn’t have one because you didn’t need one with your new digital ticket.
These are the two major reasons.
The third, swiftly-surfacing reason is something that the airlines can’t control – or should I say, someone. Goddess forbid that I should name names, but his initials are John Ashcroft.
If we face facts, we see that before September 11th airline security was a joke. Now, after September 11th, it’s still a joke – but we’re the punchline.
Bomb-sniffing dogs. Invasive x-rays that provide detailed nude photos of the people scanned. Random strip searches. Lists of “Do-Not-Fly” people that include members of such alleged terrorist organizations as the Green Party2. Classification of nail clippers as a lethal weapon. And now: random searches of cars approaching airports.
“If you have nothing to hide, then why worry about it?” Yeah, but whether I have something I want to hide or not, it’s still my car. My car, my life. I may not have a Crystal Meth lab in the basement, but that doesn’t mean that I go telling policemen to walk right in and search whenever they want to without obtaining a warrant. I may not be an illegal arms dealer, but that doesn’t mean that I want to let Ashcroft read all of my e-mail. And I might have no intention of ever breaking Virginia’s anti-sodomy laws, but I still wouldn’t let the FBI install a surveillance camera in my bedroom. If a security guard or police officer wants to search my car, they had better have a good, legal reason for doing so. But I, for one, do not feel any safer because the police can conduct random car searches. As a matter of fact, I feel even less safe.
According to TalkLeft, the only city I can currently feel safe flying into or flying out of is Seattle, Washington. There, they have decided that random car searches are illegal under their state constitution (imagine that).
Of course, following my logic, I realize that I would have to only take flights that depart from Seattle to arrive in Seattle.
According to priceline.com, I can get a real deal if I take a connecting flight in Seattle, then accept a two-night layover in Seattle before catching my next connection over to Seattle. It’ll only cost me an arm and my right leg, up to my knee.
——1 I don’t really know the gross national product of Zimbabwe, and I’m too lazy to take the 6 seconds out of my day to look it up – I just like the name. Zimbabwe. It’s almost as good as Botswana.
2 That would be the pacifistic, there’s-a-peaceful-solution-to-everything Green Party.