Flying the Unfriendly Skies

I think it's safe to say that flying these days is not like in the old days. And by the old days I would say about as recently as a decade ago. These days it seems that not a day goes by without some new report coming out about how a flight was diverted due to an unruly passenger (or passengers) or because the flight crew had some major or minor issue. One side blames the other and vice versa. It's fast becoming an arguement that could only be compared to the chicken and the egg question that has perplexed mankind for generations and will likely remain unanswered for all eternity.

Still, flying these days becomes a contest of wills and opinions in more ways than one. I mean passengers are often to blame for incidents well within their control but there are times when the incidents themselves are non-incidents to begin with. There have been instances where passengers have been asked to de-plane due to the the clothes they're wearing. Either because they were too short or too revealing, the crews took it upon themselves to ask the offending passengers to cover up or get off the plane. Okay. That's a subjective case. Perhaps the flight attendant was feeling a bit catty and decided to take the offending passenger to task to teach them a lesson. It may have been a case of undeserved discrimination over clothing sense (or lack thereof) but there are other reasons why passengers are asked to deplane.

Take for example the case recently in Phoenix where a mother, her sister and four kids were left in Phoenix by Southwest Airlines due to the fact that the kids in the group were disruptive to the point that they feared for the safety of all those flying on the plane. The sister's response to the charge was that it was just a case of 'kids being kids' and perhaps that's all it was but as some of the other passengers on the plane can tell you, it can be pure hell for the rest of us. I have flown on a number of occasions, both domestically and overseas where kids have been screaming or crying or generally carrying on to such a disturbing degree that it makes already uncomfortable travel even more uncomfortable. Now I'm not a bitter old man who hates kids but sometimes parents just aren't able to control their kids and from the perspective of airlines they have to weigh the risks. Do they risk alienating one family from future travel with them by denying them boarding on their connecting flight or do you risk alienating all the other passengers who are frustrated at having to listen to screaming children for several hours? I think the choice becomes clear.

But it's not just kids who scream and shout and cause disruptions, we adults do a pretty darn good job at times too. In New York, an American Airlines flight was cancelled when the flight crew arrived late and found the passengers understandably irate at the delay. However, they took their response a step further when they refused to fly the flight stating that they felt that they would be working in an unsafe environment. Apparently the passengers waiting in New York lived up to their reputation as being rude and crude and scared the crew enough to make them risk even more anger from the passengers by refusing to fly. Perhaps that isn't the wisest course of action but who knows if it would have gotten better or worse had they chosen to fly on.

People sometimes think that because they're paying higher prices they can take out their anger on the flight crew who have no say whatsoever on how much you're paying for your ticket or for the experience. As it is, many of us passengers treat flight attendants as something less than waitresses or waiters in cheap restaurants. They are the ones expected to handle anything and everything on a flight and if they for once do something slightly inconvenient to one person or a few people, they are immediately jumped on. It's a case of having cake and eating it too. Both parties are to blame for making the skies just a bit more un-friendlier of late and though the solution is not readily available, if we all attempt to act in a bit more civil a manner, then perhaps we can make the skies friendly again.