My Airline Adventure Part 2

above: a bag of chips and a bag of sugared peanuts was all there was to eat after midnight at the Holiday Inn Express.

Traveling by plane is one of my first memories. Was I even old enough to walk? Perhaps my Dad carried me to the cockpit (which was open) and let the pilot pin a plastic pair of wings on my t-shirt. Mom played solitaire. I saw things I was just learning to identify by name - clouds, mountains, water.

When we flew over a city at night my Mom would say, "The Lights of Los Angeles," "The Lights of Honolulu," as though each city was famous for the adoption of electricity.

I also remember our flights in the early 1980s. The flight attendants were still called, "stewards," and "stewardesses." Days after the end of a labor strike, my family traveled to Hawaii.

The jet was a DC-10, wide bodied aircraft with lounges on board up a narrow, ten-rung spiral staircase.

They would inexplicably publicized as "dangerous" by the news media though statistically they were no more prone to failure than narrow bodied jets.

The planes were, however, expensive to fly.The modest protests by the otherwise powerful and well regarded airline industry seem suspicious in retrospect.

The flight attendants and maintenance workers would soon buy one of the airlines. The airline would be assailed by corporate raiders until the communal operation went bankrupt.

These were the beginnings what is now resolutely an anti-consumer, anti-worker industry.

Are consumers so easily placated by low fares? It costs about the same travel to four cities in Europe in 2010 as it did to travel to Brussels alone in 1980. Where are those rising fuel costs? That weaker dollar?

For their part, workers seem happy to keep their jobs and senority in the company. The benefits of this are less evident as retirement age approaches.

The basic thrill of flying, that motivates both of these parties, hasn't changed. Clouds, mountains, water. The sense of being "above" is powerful.

But there must be a reason, unrelated to front line workers and consumers, that the industry is weighed down by horror stories.

Every year it seems an airline is going broke, bankrupt, merging. From a business standpoint it seems as though business is never good.

It's not all those long gone packets of playing cards. Or the continuing absence of peanuts and pretzels (which would still be worth their weight, from a liability standpoint, as alcohol absorbers.)

What if it is really related to fuel and labor? What if it is old airplanes? Worn parts? Dangerous mechanical conditions?

Aren't all of these items a small part of the bottom line? A part of the bottom line consumers would pay a little bit extra for?

Do we need an expose on the price of access to airport terminals? On the salaries of top airline executives? Is this business even motivated by bad publicity anymore?

Personally, I would cheerfully accept an amount in the mid-six figure range to be an top airline executive. I would probably save lives, jobs, money, and be popular with consumers.

If I'm deemed unqualified, I'm sure airline executives in Latin American or Southeast Asian countries would happily accept a million a year, regardless of the benefit package, for the chance to transform an increasingly ugly U.S. industry.