Warning Issued
This post crosses the line by a country mile. Personal insults are not allowed in this forum.
I know zero about the specifics of this incident. I have not read any news articles and know only what the OP said. A few thoughts about this and all the recent threads on other recent incidents.
- FAA guidance to the public on flying with children is here: https://www.faa.gov/passengers/fly_children/ A pertinent quote is
Bolding mine. IF the car seat in question was not FAA approved, the airplane cannot legally leave the gate with it in use. Regardless of the desires of the parents or the crew. If it was FAA approved, then the rest of this mess was caused by a mistake of either bad procedures, bad procedural knowledge, or bad procedural execution.
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Airlines are in a ghastly regulatory quagmire. 100% of our procedures must be approved by FAA. And once approved they then carry the full force of federal law. Consider that for a minute in the context of your own job. What if *everything *in your employee manual or in whatever passes for written or verbal guidance on how to do your daily tasks was law? A law enforced by an overbearing agency with plenty of enforcement personnel to detect most slip-ups. For the pilot and maintenance parts of the business, FAA computers are watching everything and auditing everything. This is not yet true for the in-cabin side of the business. How many shortcuts do you take every day getting your job done? We take zero. In fact we take less than zero, to ensure we don’t get too close to the unacceptable edge of taking even part of a shortcut when viewed from the wrong angle.
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Crew are in an unpleasant race with the clock. HQ wants every flight to leave on time, no excuses. Which means anything that goes wrong during boarding “needs” to be solved in a minute, tops. In a crowded noisy environment. Involving stressed customers and stressed crewmembers.
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Security. There are people out in the world who want to kill an airplane full of people. They may be on today’s flight. Having some accomplices deliberately being difficult in relatively innocuous ways is an expected bad-guy tactic. It serves several purposes: Create distraction; foment hostility by the rest of the passengers towards the crew; observe how cohesive the crew is and whether they are conflict avoidant / passive / easily overwhelmed or not.
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Viral celebrity-ism. There absolutely are customers out there working hard to be come the next Dr. Dao and cash in. Maybe a nice 6 or 7 figure settlement and lots of monetizable twitter followers. Plus appearances on the morning talk shows.
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Most flight attendants are miracle workers at “defusing” (the term of art) these kinds of situations that happen on most flights. Some very small percentage aren’t. Or at least aren’t every time. My carrier alone pumps out almost 6000 flights per day at about 150 customers apiece. That’s just shy of 1 million customers per day. So far we’ve been youtube famous once every couple of years. Some statistical perspective is in order here.
Some concluding thoughts:
Air travel today is just about the only high frustration consumer product left. It’s certainly one of the few high density group activities unless you like attending outdoor music festivals. The fact it’s noisy, at inconvenient times of day, and for most people, far from their daily routine doesn’t help one bit. Neither does the fact that compared to 99.9999% uptime for online products and 99.999% reliability for modern consumer products, we still have defect rates between 1 and 10% unless the weather really sucks in which case it climbs to 30%.
I honestly don’t now how we collectively fix this mess. The only idea I have is to massively depressurize things. Reduce airport and aircraft capacity until the pace is leisurely, delays are rare, the buildings and planes are spacious and uncrowded, and only gentle birdsong is heard instead of a blaring PA drowning out crying children and adults yelling into their phones.
Clearly that will reduce capacity by a factor of at least 50% and cause a giant price spike as well as a huge contraction in the industry. Said another way, that’s colossally uneconomic and will only happen if forced that way by regulations which take no heed of mere economics.
Another thought:
The airlines dodged a bullet with TSA. After 9/11 there was a congressional plan to make the airlines operate the security apparatus. The industry fought back that it was a governmental function. As a result we have the TSA that everyone loves to hate. But at least they don’t hate us over *that *part of the travel experience.
Imagine that all passenger boarding oversight was performed by local police. Who were trained in all the pettifogging FAA regs about child seats, degree of inebriation, pets, emotional support poo-flinging monkeys, exit row seating, carry-on luggage size & stowage, and all the rest.
Once everyone was seated and everything was stowed in accordance with the law, then, and only then, would the police stream off and the airline’s customer service workers stream on to start providing, you know, customer service.
I really see this as not too different from the public’s attitude to policemen vs. firemen. Everybody loves firemen. Their attitude to police is much more situational. They’re nice to see when a robbery is in progress and not so nice to see when you’ve been speeding. And most people have far more experience with the latter than the former.
The airlines’ collective problem is our customer service people are stuck *by government edict *into the policeman role whereas the customers, 99% legitimately, just want firemen instead.
I’m starting to feel that airlines are having some sort of weird secret competition to determine who can be the biggest asshole to their customers.
What would qualify as a fireman role - what would be the specific differences? Genuine curiosity.
Most of what most of them do every day.
The ticket counter clerk who accepts your baggage with a smile issues a different boarding pass at your request; reseats your group together; reworks your itinerary after a cancellation; finds your lost luggage in Timbuktu, etc.
The gate agent who offers and processes your upgrade; reseats your group; accommodates your oversized or excess carry-on baggage quickly at no charge; boards you early for whatever reason, obvious or not; manages a late arrival and on-time departure with no muss, fuss, or aggravation.
The flight attendant who greets people; helps with baggage stowage or at-the-door gate check; directs confused or non-English speakers to where they’re going; calms nervous fliers; feeds and waters the crowd with a smile; provides extra care when needed; handles medical emergencies, special needs passengers, and fussy babies. And resolves inter-passenger disputes (seat back recline or not; sharing arm rests, etc.) skilfully.
The pilot who honestly and skillfully manages passenger expectations about weather & mechanical problems, delays, diversions, turbulence, etc.
All of these are examples of helping roles that are expected of those workers by both the company and the customers. And most customers* have positive reactions to folks delivering these positive experiences.
The problem is we don’t have a separate group of people wearing different clothes to do these tasks vs. the people doing the enforcement tasks. Many (most?) of which are government mandates, not company mandates.
Real fireman generally have it easy. A policeman is usually dispatched along with each fire or EMS dispatch. If anybody starts being a problem to the firemen, they just say “Hey policeman: get this troublemaker out of our work area.” And away they go. If you’ve seen any of the “real police” or “real EMS” ride-along TV shows you know that not every EMS call goes smoothly. Sometimes they’re EMSing somebody out of gang fight or an insane domestic situation or from amongst a crowd of drunks. Where somebody in that crowd really wants to interfere w EMS doing their job.
What you *don’t *see is the EMS or fireman restraining the troublemaker or cleaving the troublemaker with his axe; no matter how much the fireman might like the idea or the troublemaker might deserve it. By leaving the problem entirely to the police, the fire service deflects the emotional blame for the troublemaker’s bad outcome away from themselves. Blame by both the troublemaker and by sympathetic audience members.
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- Some small fraction of customers won’t be satisfied no matter what.
LSLGuy and all -
My understanding is that flight crew do not start getting paid until the door to the aircraft is closed. I may certainly be wrong.
This is good and bad IMHO.
Of course everyone wants to leave ASAP. But if crew where paid as soon as boarding starts, perhaps they themselves wouldn’t feel as pressured or motivated to make decisions before considering options and alternatives (understanding that there are rarely alternatives).
Just saying that it may calm things down for the crew a bit?
From the New York Times, February 29, 2016, “Fighting the Incredible Shrinking Seat”:
So, they’re a bit over 8% narrower than they used to be, and over 11% closer together from front to back.
(And yes, we have also gotten bigger.)
Don’t forget that flight attendants in the USA are members of a union. The airline vets hew hires the best they can, but once they are on the job, it may be difficult or impossible to remove ann unsuitable attendant from potentially harmful exposure to the public. Even if reprimanded, a flight attendant may live to offend again.
That’s not really much of an issue. At least not directly.
Speaking in generalities about the industry a whole, we’re (pilots and FA’s) paid if the airplane isn’t parked at the terminal. So no pay until we push back then the meter is running until we park it someplace else. Closing the door isn’t itself a pay checkpoint except that it’s one of the last preconditions to actually moving.
There are generally provisions that we’re paid the greater of how long it takes, or how long it was planned to take. So leaving late and arriving less late costs us nothing. Directly. As well there are usually pay provisions that take into account the normal amount of hotel time and normal amount of at-work-but-not-flying time. Trips which are built with excesses of either such time have some extra pay thrown in to partly offset that. And to disincentivize the company from wasting our lives that way for free. These provisions also come into effect when things get disrupted.
So in all, we’re *mostly *insulated from minute by minute vagaries in the operation.
Bigger picture:
One reason crews dislike delays is simple professionalism: on-time, like a smooth landing (pilots) or a stress-free ride (FAs) is one of the few quality metrics customers can actually see and understand.
The other big reason is the knock-on effects. At the start of the day if we’re 10 minutes late that means we’re probably rushing at the next destination trying to make up that 10 minutes for the next flight back out of that city. If that continues, by the end of the day our rest break at the hotel may be an hour shorter than planned. And they’re often pretty darn short to start out with. In fact sometimes delays today propagate forward into delays tomorrow where we have to start late to simply get the FAA mandated possibility to sleep some.
Or worse, if things get messed up we may miss our own flight connection(s) later in the day. So now we’re sleeping in a different city then flying different segments tomorrow to get back into position to re-intercept the planned trajectory of our trip or else we’re just assigned random work, picking up the pieces from other crewmembers’ disrupted trips.
All this disruption may, depending on the circumstances and the specific airline, have cost ourselves up to a couple thousand dollars in lost pay or a lost day off or both. Lost pay for work not performed; lost days for simply not being rescheduled back to home when planned.
Bottom line: five minutes here or there has no meaningful impact on the crew. After that the risks build non-linearly. Which is pretty much the same story for passengers. People’s itineraries have 5 minutes of slack. They mostly don’t have half an hour of slack.
It’s worth pointing out that bus lines transport people all across the US.
I can’t recall even one news story about passengers being hassled or kicked off over seating.
I’m sure there are a few drunks that are booted off. But it doesn’t go viral.
I don’t know about that.
About Greyhound says they carried 18 million passengers in an unidentified recent year. That’s about 5 days’ work for the Big 4 US airlines: American, Delta, Southwest & United. To be sure, there are more US bus companies than just Greyhound. But I’d be amazed if the rest of the intercity bus operators put together were 25% of the industry. IOW, I WAG that Greyhound is 75% of that industry. For round numbers, the Big 4 really are 75% of the US airline industry.
To come up with the cite above I Binged for [greyhound bus total passenger count]. That was the first link to come up. The *second *link (of 275,000) was this: “Greyhound bus driver fighting with a passenger - …” Greyhound bus driver fighting with a passenger - YouTube.
Make of that what you will.
I used to be an airline pilot, now on the corporate side. Addressing some points brought up by various posters:
Pressure to depart on time: I think the standards and reporting on this are part of the problem. When I was at a regional airline the company had a conference call meeting every month about on-time performance. It consisted of each department head attempting to blame the others for each instance of a flight not departing on time. It was vicious, and nobody wanted to be blamed.
On-time stats are reported to the government, and last I recall (help me LSL Guy), being one minute over counts as “late”. That’s stupid, especially considering how it can be fudged. I’ve been in jumpseats and witnessed the captain drop the parking brake while sitting at the gate. In planes so equipped, that sends a signal indicating departure. In others not so equipped, I’ve seen the pilots simply radio in favorable on/off times to ensure they weren’t “late”. You couldn’t get away with too much, but a few minutes here and there was common.
Maybe the stats should consider a window of “within 5-10 minutes” defining “on-time”. Point being, I believe airlines and crews are incentivized to treat people poorly in an effort not to be .001 seconds late, because the stats make no distinction between that and more or less on time.
Unions protecting bad crew members: Not all airlines are unionized. The one I worked for was not. And in any case, that’s not how unions work. Even tenured teachers can be fired for cause - union protections just guarantee a form of due process before that happens.
Culturally, we don’t do de-escalation very well: I have a friend who was in federal law enforcement. If you ask him about the current culture of policing he’ll tell you, “There are a lot of people who just shouldn’t be cops.” He talks a lot about de-escalation, and how it’s a lost art. I think this is true of flight crews too.
I’ve known many great flight attendants, and also a handful who had no business interacting with the general public. De-escalation was not part of their vocabulary. Like we’re seeing with these latest incidents, their attitude was “do what I say, or else because I’m part of a flight crew and it’s the law”. That distorts the importance and necessity of the flight crew being in charge. It’s not a license to abuse people.
Security and the general unpleasantness of flying: It’s definitely gotten out of hand. I’m completely sympathetic with the public’s feelings that modern flying is needlessly dehumanizing. The security problem is well known - even if 99.999% of people don’t intend to blow up the plane, you can’t allow the one outlier to do it. Fine, I accept that. But I’ll be damned if it requires treating everyone terribly, which is what we have now.
I recently changed jobs, which meant I had to turn in my airline IDs and badges. Then I had to travel to training at my new company. After going through security as a “civilian” I can see why everyone is pissed off. Frankly, once my career is over I doubt I’ll ever fly as a passenger again.
Overbooking: There’s been a lot of talk about this practice, but it seems only peripherally related to some of the incidents we’ve seen. In any case, I think it stinks. I had a girlfriend in the hotel business and she described how that industry does it, which is similar. Higher tier customers (rewards members and such) get preference. The schlub who booked a basic room gets “walked” if they’re oversold.
The airlines do this in a similar fashion. First-class passengers are usually safe, and there’s a hierarchy from there. This means someone can buy a ticket and get screwed. That’s wrong.
There is an argument that the practice is necessary because of cancellations, and there’s probably some truth in that. But it doesn’t make it right. I believe if a person books a hotel room or a seat on a plane, that reservation should mean something. Can there be fees for breaking that reservation or not showing up? Sure. But the current system is thoughtless and lends itself to treating people badly. It should go.
Summing it up - we need to treat people better in many ways, and not just those who pay more.
Llama Llogophile – thank you for the post, I liked reading thoughts from an industry insider directly involved.
Trying to understand this. A little oddly worded.
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pilots and FA’s are paid if the plane isn’t parked at the terminal and are waiting for an overdue plane due to weather or whatever?
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But you do not get paid if the plane is there until you push back from the terminal?
Agree with your overall post.
DOT requires airlines report their statistics in 3 areas: Flights arriving within 15 minutes of scheduled time, flights cancelled, and mishandled checked bags per 1000.
So from DOT’s perspective an early arrival, one exactly on time, or one 14 minutes 59 seconds late are all exactly the same: “on time”. A 15:00 minute late arrival, or one arriving 12 hours late are both exactly the same: “late”.
Airlines are very much creatures of statistics. Everything is instrumented and analysed. They were doing “big data” in the 1960s. Given the other vagaries of the operation they know very well that departing 5 minutes late vastly increases the chances of an officially “late” flight. Either than one, or of a subsequent one due to a knock-on effect. The dominoes are arranged in an unstable configuration and preventing the first to fall is the key to success. The result of this is the carriers themselves, each to varying degrees, have embraced “Leave exactly on time, not 1 minute late.” as a mantra.
The fact that surveys of frequent fliers and corporate travel department heads place “leave on time” as one of their very highest priorities in choosing an airline also weighs heavily since those are the people paying the freight for all the tourists on discount tickets clogging up the airplanes and airports.
So to directly answer LL’s point: DOT measures arrival time with a 15 minute grace period. Most carriers primarily measure departure time with a zero second grace period. As their way to achieving good DOT statistics at the other end.
This gets to what I was getting at in the OP. There have always been unruly passengers, drunken passengers, passengers having psychotic episodes, etc. But my impression is that FA responses have become disproportional in the past few years. Many of the incidents I read about sound as if they’re throwing their weight around.
[side note]May I say that this is a wonderful turn of a phrase.[/sn]
I’ve noticed quite a change in airline staff since 9/11. It goes beyond security measures.
There is this do what I say or else attitude that wasn’t as noticable before 9/11.
The comments about de-escalation are very much on point. That was the crews goal before 9/11. They were more service oriented. They couldn’t please every passenger but they at least tried to avoid a confrontation.
There are many great flight attendants that make flying enjoyable. The few bad ones are really hurting the industry.
One suggestion is to create a system to reward the good flight attendants. Perhaps an online survey where passengers could rate their flight crew. A small bonus or other perk could be awarded to flight attendants with consistently high ratings. A little recognition for a job well done goes a long way.
It has gotten worse, for sure. Our neighbors just took a vacation trip to Europe for two weeks. They were on one of the newer “Dreamliner” aircraft, which was anything but. Nine seats across and cramped as could be. The FAs would not allow passengers to just get up and walk around to ease discomfort, nor could they line up for the toilets.
Another complaint point: he said that airport security throughout their travels was polite and respectful and answered any questions – until they returned to the US, where people - including American citizens - were being shouted at and treated rudely by TSA bullies. They were shocked by the general assholishness of these petty tyrants.
See that’s a common problem with these sorts of complaints. People want to simplify the situation to match their misconceptions and preconceived notions so that their righteous indignation is justified.
Most common is police shootings where people assume the police acted wrongly even though the facts of the particular case don’t match the narrative. So the story is abstracted away from reality so that it can match what everyone “knows” is the truth.