The Unfriendly Skies

I don’t know about you, but I love to fly. Put me in a Boeing 707, a Douglas DC-8, or a Convair 880 and I’m literally in heaven. Once we’re safely aloft, I sit back in my roomy, brocade-upholstered seat, loosen my tie, stretch my legs all the way out, and call that slender, honey-voiced 23-year-old stewardess in the attractive Pucci uniform over there to bring me a pillow, an aspirin, and an Old Fashioned. Later, she’ll give me a deck of cards and maybe she’ll even sit in the empty seat beside me for a hand of gin rummy or two. Then, after a delicious steak, I’ll light up a Chesterfield and OH WAIT THE WORLD MAKES SENSE I MUST BE DREAMING I’M IN MAD MEN AGAIN

For those of you under age of thirty, air travel is a necessary evil. Traveling by commercial airline is inconvenient, unpleasant, humiliating, uncomfortable, and degrading. But it’s no big deal. That’s just the way it is.

But it wasn’t always. Once upon a time, airline travel in the U.S was convenient, classy, comfortable, and even a little bit glamorous. Once upon a time, men wore coats and ties when they took a flight somewhere; ladies wore gloves and hats; and children were dressed in their Sunday best when they got on board an airplane.

Not today. We all agree: today, U.S. airlines suck. But why? Why did it all change?

In a word: DEREGULATION.

In 1978, Congress voted to deregulate the airline industry. Previously, the United States airlines were regulated by a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board, or CAB. The CAB dictated the routes and schedules of the nation’s commercial air carriers; it also established the prices that US carriers charged for tickets. This system, which amounted to a subsidy of the airline industry, kept ticket prices high by today’s standards, enabling the carriers to fly airplanes that were half-full, or airplanes with open, comfortable layouts (some planes had real honest-to-Quinn stand-up bars in them — even in Coach class!). It also allowed them to fly big, roomy aircraft on domestic routes instead of the miserable flying Greyhound buses used today for air travel within the U.S.  In short, the system of regulation imposed on the airlines by the CAB had the effect of maximizing room-per-passenger on board airliners — and thus maximizing passenger comfort.

The high ticket prices had another beneficial effect: they kept the riff-raff out. Air travel in the olden days was a middle-class-or-higher affair. The people who flew back then were serious folk, people with Somewhere Important To Go: businessmen, engineers, rocket scientists, vacationing families, even celebrities and government officials.The guy sitting next to you on the plane back then had on a shirt and tie; if he was a she, she was wearing a navy wool trapeze dress with a Peter Pan collar and had a sailor hat on top of her exquisitely bouffant hair. In those well-dressed days, no sane adult would have dreamed of getting on board an airplane wearing anything except serious grown-up clothes; the uniform of a dirty race car-patterned T-shirt, denim shorts, and pink flip-flops so popular among les petits blancs pauvres de caravane that comprise the majority of U.S. air passengers today would have never been permitted on an airliner in those enlightened times. An airplane was a refuge of civility, a place of calm, couth, and consideration. If you wanted to wear your pajama bottoms and wife-beater T-shirt, you took the bus.

And then there was the Amenities Race. Since the airlines (there were many to choose from back then, unlike today) were all basically charging the same prices for their tickets, they couldn’t compete on the basis of price — so they competed on the basis of service. As a result, air carriers in those days fought an ever-escalating war for passenger loyalty, with victory going to the line with the hottest stews, the shortest skirts, the most giveaways (remember those little vinyl “flight bags”?) and the strongest cocktails.

This drive to attract regular flyers got a little crazy sometimes: Braniff Airlines (now defunct) hired big-shot designer Alexander Girard — probably the greatest designer of the 20th Century — to redesign its logos, its planes, and its overall look, and brought in tastemaker and advertising expert Mary Wells to remake its interiors. Wells in turn hired the world-famous Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci to create a special “inter-changeable wardrobe” for the company’s stews; as your flight progressed, the stewardesses on board would remove parts of their uniform during flight, upping their sex appeal as each garment came off. This was the infamous “Braniff Air Strip“. (He even designed a “bikini uniform” for Braniff stews that unfortunately never made it to the center aisle.) Later, Southwest Airlines would build its entire business on sexiness: by skipping the “air strip” and putting its youmg, model-gorgeous stewardesses in hip-length hot pants and leather Sex Boots from the very beginning, they positioned themselves as the “hot” air carrier. They really were the “Somebody Else Up There Who Loves You“. And we loved being up there with them.

And of course, there was the food. Believe it or not, there was once a time when airlines served food to passengers. Real food: meat, fish, veg, bread, wine, the works. A lot of it was even good food, created by professional chefs in gourmet airline kitchens. (On international flights, many airlines served meals featuring the cuisine of the destination country — foie gras if you were flying to Paris on United, for example, or sukiyaki on Northwest Orient’s daily nonstop to Tokyo.) And they served it up on china plates, with metal knives and forks, and real glass tumblers for your booze afterward. The dishes and such were all emblazoned with the logo of the airline in question, of course, which just makes it cooler. And when the dishes were cleared away, the stewardesses would bring you a deck of logo-marked playing cards, a pack of cigarettes, a newspaper, or whatever you needed to stay happy.

You can’t see my face right now, but I’m crying.

And what of the kinder? Today, small children are persona non grata on most airlines — hated by uncomfortable, irritable passengers, tolerated at best by grouchy, overworked flight attendants. But in the old days air crews loved kids, and flying was a child’s greatest adventure. If you were under age ten or so, the stewardess would take you up to the cockpit, introduce the captain, copilot, and flight engineer, and pin a set of wings on you. They’d then show you all the knobs and dials, let you listen to the tower on the headset, and sometimes even allow you to sit in the pilot’s seat. Can you imagine something like that happening today? Hell no, you can’t, because it can never happen.

Babies were equally welcomed. The stewardesses, most of whom were young, single girls, would coo and aww over Baby and lavish him or her with warmed bottles, special blankies, rum-impregnated pacifiers (okay, that was for Mommy), and in general provide both infant and mother with le traitement de luxe. When nap time rolled around, the stews would move Mommy and child to a row of three unoccupied seats and fold up the armrests for that “sofa in the sky” effect. Voilà — a flying crib for a soothing snooze.

Even pre-born babies got the kid glove. It was not unusual for pregnant women to get a free upgrade to first class “because these seats back here in Coach are just too uncomfortable for mothers-to-be like you, ma’am!” Today? “Shut up and eat your pretzels, breeder.”

That was then. This is now. But it’s not all bad news: there are still airlines out there that treat passengers with dignity and respect.

Unfortunately, they’re all foreign. In most countries, air carriers are considered a part of the nation’s transportation system, and are either owned outright by the government or are subsidized with tax dollars. Freed from the constant Hobbesian fare wars that US carriers must fight, many foreign airlines have no incentive to cut corners in customer service in order to undercut their competitors’ ticket price. As in the U.S. prior to deregulation, they can afford to treat their customers like human beings instead of animals.

The problem of US air travel is competition based upon price. When airlines charged Neiman-Marcus prices, passengers enjoyed Neiman-Marcus standards of service. Now, airlines charge Wal-Mart prices; is it any wonder we receive Wal-Mart quality service when we fly?

No, the only thing to be done is to end the ever-deepening race for the lowest possible ticket price in our airline industry and restore the practice of competition on the basis of service. In other words: re-regulation. I say bring back the CAB, the high ticket prices, the unspoken dress codes, all of it. Send the lower-middle and working classes back to the bus stations. Hire stewardesses based upon their youth, charm and beauty, and put the gray-faced air cows out to pasture. Hire real chefs to serve real food on real plates. Treat kids as welcomed guests rather than as annoying intruders. Bring back playing cards, flight bags, and other logo-branded swag. And why not make one flight in five an all-smoking flight and charge passengers a premium to engage in their bad habit? (Note: I don’t smoke.)

And the there’s our so-called “transportation security” nightmare. When I was a kid, there was no airport security. You could walk from the parking lot into the terminal, through the boarding door at the gate (no jet bridges in those days), out onto the apron, through a gap in a chain-link fence, and up the rolling stairway into the plane without once being asked to take off your shoes, strip, or throw away the pocketknife your Dad gave you when you were six. Somehow, we survived having no “security” back then. We can do so now.

And for Pete’s sake, can we please get rid of the TSA? Never there lived a bigger, more useless bunch of inept assclowns than that clan of highly trained federal law enforcement morons. They secure nothing. No form of airport “security” can guarantee passenger safety. The Bad Guy will always get through. With that in mind, it’s obvious that we need to focus our effort on training passengers in how to resist and defeat terrorists in the air. For example, we might simply allow airline passengers to carry guns on the aircraft. I’d like to see a terrorist try and take over a plane carrying 250 heavily armed men on their way to the annual drywall contractors’ convention. Dump two or three bullet-riddled jihadi corpses onto the tarmac and the threat of being flown into the Capitol by a crazed Koran-jockey goes away. Hell, the airlines should issue each passenger a gun and ammunition before they board the plane. Now that’s transportation security.

“But it’s socialism!” you cry. Is it? Socialism is an economic system in which the ownership of the means of production are centralized in the hands of the State. The U.S. government didn’t own the airlines back in the Good Old Days. Then as now, air carriers were publicly traded private corporations, with stock certificates, shareholder meetings, the works. What the government did do back then was regulate the airline industry, the same way it regulates the trucking industry, the railroads, and all other businesses involved in interstate commerce for the public good.

“But if airlines compete for customers on the basis of price, their profits will go up, and they will be able to afford to provide better service!” History says: horsecrap. The horrible androids that run the airline industry don’t give a hoot in hell about providing better service to passengers, They’d sedate us and stack us like cordwood in unheated cargo pods if Uncle Sam would let them. What they will do with windfall profits is give themselves fat bonuses, and to hell with the scum that fly on their airline.

Besides, airlines are not profit-making businesses. As Billionaire financier Warren Bufffett once famously said “As of 1992, in fact–though the picture would have improved since then – the money that had been made since the dawn of aviation by all of this country’s airline companies was zero. Absolutely zero. Sizing all this up, I like to think that if I’d been at Kitty Hawk in 1903 when Orville Wright took off, I would have been farsighted enough, and public-spirited enough – I owed this to future capitalists – to shoot him down. I mean, Karl Marx couldn’t have done as much damage to capitalists as Orville did.” ¹

Let’s stop pretending, okay? The whole fantasy of a market-driven airline industry is silly. All airlines are subsidized by government money in some form. From the beginning, the airlines needed the guiding hand of Big Government in order to keep the Friendly Skies friendly. Let’s kick the idiotic idea of a free-market airline industry to the curb and go back to treating it as a regulated public utility.

Economics is a game we play. Right now, the rules of the Passenger Airline Game are rigged in favor of the Money Boys. But if  we rig the game in favor of the passengers instead of the investors, comfort and dignity can again be ours — the way it was in the World That Made Sense.