Blue Airline Moments

The airline industry is in turmoil. I wrote about the general state of affairs a few months ago. Today, I just want to note my personal experiences on a single flight that further brought home to me just how bad things are getting.

I flew from JFK to San Jose on jetBlue this morning. By the way, they use a small" j" and a capital "B", with no space between the words. Why? I don't know. I bet they paid a small fortune for someone to come up with that name.

Back to the subject at hand, I've taken the same flight several times before and had no particular problems. Today, however, the airline gods got the best of me.

The flight was listed as "on time" with boarding scheduled at 8:20 AM. That time passed with no announcements made alerting us to any problem. Then, at the scheduled 8:50 AM departure time, the gate agent announced that they were one flight attendant short. No one could board the plane until another crew member arrived. No further announcements were made for the next 4 hours.

After waiting about two hours, I and a number of fellow travelers asked the gate agent, the operations manager, the senior member of the air crew, and generally anyone in uniform, what was happening. Different responses were given over the next two hours, but they all fell into the category of: we have been told that a flight attendant has been located and will arrive "momentarily".

We all had a lot of fun trying to interpret the meaning of "momentarily".

Well, apparently in the airline industry, "momentarily" means "about four hours", because that's when the missing attendant arrived. We then boarded, and eventually flew to San Jose, tired, but grateful to actually reach our destination.

Of interest, it seems that the entire jetBlue operation rested on finding a sole crew member to agree to come in on a scheduled day off and replace a missing employee who couldn't make the flight. You'd think that a major corporation would manage to have a spare around for instances like this, but, like me, you'd be wrong.

It was especially galling to be delayed this long as the role of a flight attendant these days is pretty minimal, with "service" reduced to handing out drinks and snacks. Oh yes, they also sell headphones, adult beverages, and pillows and blankets. The key selling point for the pillows and blankets was that, unlike the ones you used to get for free, these were "clean".

The Airline Business

I wonder what it is like to run an airline. The industry is only a little less unpopular than George W. Bush, your friendly cable company and the IRS. Whatever you do, people complain.

They have one heck of a business model. They are selling all their seats (been on a flight with fewer than 99% of seats filled recently?) and they are still losing money. They have to do something. Well, here's what they are doing.

1. Sell fewer seats. This must be a good idea, I guess, since they're all doing it. At the logical extreme, they each sell no seats at all. Then, the seats can be priced infinitely high. The only minor snag is that there are no planes flying and no seats available to sell. They're obviously assuming that the public will quickly adjust to this minor inconvenience.

2. Unbundle service. Well, first of all, to call these unbundled items "service" is a slight stretch. The list of "services" they are now charging for includes checking a bag, getting a reservation for a seat, being served food or beverages, and, ...well, you get the idea. I suppose the airlines could charge extra if you want a guarantee that the plane will actually land in a specific city that you choose ahead of time. It would be a heck of a lot less bother for the airlines if they could just fill up their planes as passengers arrived at the airport and fly them to wherever was most convenient.

3. Complain to Congress. It used to be that the airlines were regulated. The most successful airlines employed hoards of lawyers with the proper political skills and made lots of money. The downside was that the government decided who could fly a specified route and what price they could charge. Maybe they should return to those days again. There must be hundreds of unemployed lobbyists available now that Obama and McCain have banned them from their campaigns.

I'm sure that there are many more creative ideas that the airline executives could use. Feel free to post any that I've missed. They may pay you if they adopt your idea (although you'll probably have to sue them first).