Considering that the airlines are doing such a shitty job of not trampling over the basic human rights of the passengers, I think it’s about time that they’re forced to adhere to at least some basic sanitary standards by law. The system as it exists now does not work. These abuses are happening at the hands of flight attendants.
They need to be stopped. The airlines won’t, and so it’s time for the legislature to step in.
This only makes it even more imperative that the law be changed.
Values-based decisions? What they seem to learn is that they are the petty dictator of the tiny banana republic known as the inside of the airplane. The answer to ‘I need to use the restroom right now or I’m going to piss (or shit) myself.’ is not ‘No.’
If it was just my experiences, nobody would be proposing a law that says you have to allow someone access to a restroom after being confined for three hours. It’s not. Air travel has become torture, and considering that airlines are constantly bitching about bankruptcy worries and now charging extra for second bags and shit like that, you’d think they’d eventually reach a point where they might try to treat their customers with a little respect and dignity rather than as self loading cargo. I don’t really care what perturbs you. You are a part of the problem in the air travel industry, and all you’re doing is suggesting that people piss themselves as a solution.
Yeah I’m sure my attitude caused the push for a passenger bill of rights in in New York, and was the reason for the experience that Una Persson had when she was stuck on the runway for somewhere around 9 hours. It’s had to do with the stories all over CNN after the big weather delay fiasco and the lack of access to restrooms on a SkyWest plane.
Yup. Those were all me. It must be just me, that I have an attitude problem. It couldn’t possibly have ever happened to anyone else.
There’s no point continuing this part of the discussion, as we both clearly have made up our minds, and we’re just spinning wheels now.
Once again, you’re taking your experiences with a handful of flight attendants and applying them to the entire industry. That’s definitely not the case for the majority of flight attendants you’ll come across. Ours do a damn fine job, regardless of the stereotype you’d like to attribute to them.
Well, I won’t suggest jumping up and going to the bathroom, one reason being the one I pointed out. Another is that if you do, and you ARE dealing with one of the rare asshole flight attendants, he or she is likely to call the cockpit to advise them of an unruly passenger. In that case, they’ll return to the gate to let you off, and you’re unlikely to garner ANY sympathy from the other passengers since you’ll be the scapegoat reason for wasting two hours waiting for takeoff.
The industry is not perfect. No industry is. But it’s my opinion that federal regulation is not needed at this point, and eventually most airlines will wisen up if they lose enough revenue over it. If they don’t, then clearly the majority of their flyers are willing to put up with it.
The flaw in your logic is that, in a relatively small industry (in terms of the number of competitors), there’s no real motivation for them to change their behavior. People need to fly, and it’s more a case of having to put up with it than being willing to put up with it.
If i need to get from Baltimore to San Francisco, i have a limited number of choices. And basically every company that i have to choose from opposes a government-mandated passenger’s bill of rights, and is unwilling to issue their own concrete guidelines telling passengers what rights they have when on board the aircraft. Even after the Jet Blue fiasco of last year, Jet Blue itself made only small token efforts to improve communication with its customers and change the way it handles flight delays. And every other airline went into standard spin mode, decrying the need for a bill of rights and claiming that they make their decisions in a reasonable and customer-sensitive manner.
And yet complaints like catsix’s and Una Persson’s pile up in the hundreds and thousands on airline-related forums and message boards. But i guess they are merely anecdotal evidence, and thus require no consideration.
atomicbadgerrace is right though, it is all anecdotal evidence. And much like the ‘ugly chicks too hot to fly’, it rapidly spirals down into a he said, she said scenario with the airline on one side and the passenger on the other. Seeing as many, if not most, of us have had good or at least neutral experiences with flight staff, it does make me wonder.
I’m not denying that there is the occasional bitchy flight attendant out there, but most I’ve dealt with have been pleasant, and I’ve certainly seen passengers behave very poorly. People are tired, stressed, sometimes haven’t slept or showered for days, and some are on their way to funerals or high pressure business meetings. It’s not really our finest hour. God knows I wouldn’t want to be a flight attendant and deal with all that crap.
I guess, based on my experience and that of everyone I know, it just doesn’t seem like a big crisis to me, like you’re making it out to be. If you want to bitch about how hard it is to actually use frequent flier miles, there’s a rant I can get behind!
There’s plenty of motivation in the airline industry. Competition is tough, and fare wars are getting tighter and tighter, leading airlines to look to other methods of attracting customers. Being known as the “airline with bitchy flight attendants” won’t be a point in your favor.
And for the most part, they do. Situations like the one catsix described are extraordinarily rare – thousands of flights operate daily without having to sit on a runway for hours, and without the gung ho bitch flight attendant. In the rare instance of a breakdown, many customer complaints are handled to a mutual liking. It’s this odd ball situation that people remember – and yes, it does suck that that particular flight attendant handled the situation, but like I said, the same can be said of any industry.
The overwhelming majority of flights go off without a hitch. For the ones that don’t, the airline has to pray like hell that it hired the right folks to handle the situation. When they don’t, they pay for it with the stigma of one bad incident. No business wants bad press, and catsix makes it seem as though he/she believes that airlines reject federal legislation because they reject customer service, when this isn’t the case.