Fly the Traumatic Skies

On the face of things, the story I saw this week on the website for one of the Seattle news stations looks like just another of airlines being foolish – and I’ve already spoken to you all of my determination not to let this degenerate into the Airlines Follies blog. But once I dug down past the headline, I came to realize that the story has a bit more to it than meets the eye- and it isn’t just the company that is racing to the bottom, because at least part of their concerns are at least partly reasonable…

You can pick up the original story from the King 5 News site if you want to, but the basic scenario is that a woman who has terminal cancer is trying to fly home from Seattle to Korea to spend her few remaining weeks with her family. She and her daughter obtained all of the medical clearances saying she was healthy enough to travel that the airline required, and signed off on all of the forms required to deal with the various legal issues, but the airline still refused to let her board at the last moment, saying that the other passengers would be traumatized if she were to pass away unexpectedly during the flight. Despite being presented with multiple expert opinions that this would not happen, the airline wouldn’t budge and also started making trouble about the refund (saying that processing the refund would take longer than the woman had to live), which prevented her from just taking the money and buying passage on another carrier…

Now, the business with the refund was heartless; it was also illegal, and after this was pointed out to them by the news program, the airline relented and coughed up the money. But while it would be fun to condemn the airline for the passenger trauma concerns in the first place, we can’t – which is to say, given the current state of the U.S. legal system, we can not say with any confidence that someone on that flight wouldn’t have taken the opportunity of having a fellow passenger expire during the trip to sue the airline for vast sums of money for emotional trauma or whatever cockamamie nonsense they (and their lawyers) could dream up. We can suggest that the company should have the courage of their convictions, that they should stand up for their passengers and against frivolous lawsuits, or that if they keep attempting to avoid anything that might conceivably traumatize anyone they will not be able to continue running their business for any length of time – but the fact is, that’s not our call to make…

As I occasionally note on my other blog, Notes on a Business Page , the management of any publicly held company isn’t paid to take on all of the injustice and evil in the world; they are paid to make money for the stockholders who actually own the company. It’s possible that the airline’s stockholders would have approved of taking a gamble to get this customer home, but short of an emergency stockholder’s meeting (for which there also wasn’t time) there is no way for the management team to know that, and if the stockholders have voted against accepting legal risk for such situations in the past, then the management team was just following the directives of the people who actually own the company. We can deplore those policies, and if you care enough about this issue you could purchase stock in the airline and protest at the next stockholder’s meeting, but short of that, we can’t really say that the management team has done anything wrong…

That honor must go to all of the people who have sued over such issues in recent years, and all of the ones who read this story and thought “Payday!” and their attorneys, of course. Because the truth is that those individuals aren’t just racing to the bottom; they’re jetting there at 525 knots on four jet engines…

The Human Factor

Every once in a while you’ll hear someone talking about how all of the new security we’ve been seeing since 9/11 is just window dressing; not only are the borders still as open and the ports (air and sea) just as vulnerable as ever, but the actual TSA security, which manages to defy multiple Amendments from the Bill of Rights, manners and (frequently) sanity is accomplishing nothing. Now, I’m as security-minded as the next guy, and more patriotic than most; I want to be as sure as possible that no one is going to slip a bomb onto the next airplane I ride on, and I’m perfectly okay with whatever our government decides to do to anyone who does. Nevertheless, you have to wonder if the pessimists are correct when you hear stories like this one from the CBS affiliate station in Boston …

If you don’t want to hit the link, the story is pretty straightforward: TSA agents testing the security procedures in Charlotte managed to get a package onto a Jet Blue flight to Boston by the time-honored method of slipping a $100 bill to the agent at the front counter. Yes, you heard that correctly; for a measly $100 an otherwise sane adult was willing to place a package containing who knows what onto an airliner. I’m not sure if I’m more appalled as a consumer (I expect better from the private sector!) as a reasonably ethical human being (how could ANYONE risk over a hundred human lives in such an idiotic and reckless fashion for mere personal gain?) or as a business teacher (you risked a life sentence for $100? Really? You’re okay with being paid the equivalent of $2 a year for the next fifty years? Assuming they don’t just execute you for being a terrorist or an idiot?) Nor do I find assurances by the TSA or the airline that all packages going aboard are screened for explosives in any way reassuring; the desk agent was willing and able to commit forgery, perjury, and accept a bribe that put over a hundred people in mortal danger – do you expect me to have any faith in his or her adherence to safety protocol?

I should also point out that this is a plot element from a movie that was, unfortunately, released the same week as the 9/11 outrages: two minor criminals are able to get tickets for themselves and a hostage out of the country simply by offering the desk agent several large bills. They’re also carrying an atomic bomb with them in the mistaken belief that it’s really a case full of diamonds, but that’s not point; 9/11 itself proved that you don’t need to get a bomb onto a plane to destroy it – or to kill several thousand people on the ground at the same time. My point here is that as long as the people working for the airlines and TSA remain fallible human beings there will always be some chance of this happening – and if these individuals are underpaid and overworked (or even believe that they are) they will be able to justify such misdeeds in their own mind for long enough to cause another set of catastrophes…

Of course, this time there was a happy ending; this time the mysterious package was just a test article and the sender was an undercover TSA agent. But as long as our entire airline security system is based on everyone who works at every airport doing the right thing regardless of temptation, resentment, or personal feelings, then it’s only a matter of time before this sort of outrage happens for real – and another airline destination joins us on our Race to the Bottom…

And You Thought Lost Luggage Was Bad…

One could probably suggest that without the Airline industry, this secondary blog would never have made it out of the gate; I first got the idea for Racing to the Bottom when I realized that by the time I’d written an airline rant and posted it something worse would have surfaced on the news, and I’d be starting all over again. Of course, it’s also true that given how low the bar has been set, all the industry would have to do to get me (and probably five to ten million other bloggers) to stop ragging on them would be to just spend a few weeks operating with the same competence demonstrated by your average fast-food stand. This is not one of those weeks, however…

In a story that hit yesterday, MSNBC is reporting that a nine-year-old boy travelling by himself from San Francisco to Ottawa was left stranded at O’Hare International Airport for nearly eight hours because the airline personnel who were supposed to get him onto his connecting flight forgot about him and left him in the daycare center in the terminal. It wasn’t until his plane arrived (late) in Ottawa and his mother realized that he wasn’t on it that anyone realized anything was wrong…

Now, there’s no evidence to support the mother’s contention that her son was intentionally bumped off an overcrowded flight, on the principle that a child isn’t going to complain when adults tell him to do something. It’s actually quite possible that the ramp agent who was supposed to be looking after the boy was diverted to other duties, sent home early, or just didn’t realize that no one else was going to come and pick him up from the daycare center. None of that changes the fact that the child’s parents had already shelled out a hefty “unaccompanied minor” fee, or that the airline had a contractual responsibility (not to mention legal, ethical and moral obligations) to make sure that someone looked after the boy and got him onto the correct airplane. Nevertheless, it does make you wonder just exactly what was going on in O’Hare that would classify as more important than not making the company look like blithering idiots in front of the entire world…

That is, until you realize that the airline in question is United; the same people who managed to lose the luggage of a musician who had already become world-famous for mocking them on You Tube. In this case, they’re just lucky that the boy in our story had a pre-paid cell phone on him, and the presence of mind to call his mother and tell her what had happened; most parents in that situation would have informed the authorities, and since this was an international flight, that would have involved the FBI and their Canadian counterparts. There’s a very real possibility that there would have been arrests, criminal charges, or even an international incident, if the wrong people got their noses out of joint. As it is, the airline is going to considerable limits to avoid being sued – and I’m not convinced that any of them will help…

It’s been said that if you can’t get the little things right, you’ll never get the big ones right. It’s probably not fair to say that a company that can’t get one small customer from one gate to another without losing him for eight hours doesn’t inspire much confidence, but there’s no question that it would suggest a careless, lackadaisical and unprofessional attitude that we can only hope does not extend into the people who operate or maintain the airplanes. Because if that ever happens, United is going to be racing straight into the ground…

Striking Back At Random

By now, some of you will have heard about the now-resolving pilot’s strike at Spirit Airlines, and the fallout that resulted from it. Spirit has a special place here on Racing to the Bottom; they were the company profiled in the original post from the main blog that inspired this one in the first place; you can read about their new carry-on baggage fees by following the preceding link, assuming you still want to. But as much of a new low as this concept was just two months ago, their performance over the past week, while their flight crews were out on strike, may have shattered their previous record or even established a new standard for their industry to avoid – all during a week in which the company wasn’t even operating…



Spirit had been wrestling with the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) for some time; there’s a Federally-mandated 30-day “cooling off” period between the time when talks break down and when a labor action can legally be started, and that time had obviously expired before the Spirit pilots walked off the job. However, as reported on Portfolio.com, the company did not inform any of the people who had purchased tickets on Spirit that a strike was forthcoming, or that they would be cancelling all of their scheduled flights over the weekend; nor did they allow anyone who had purchased their tickets to change their flight dates or request a refund for the flights without paying a $100 fee. The company did promise to find pilots from other airlines to operate their flights, or purchase tickets for their passengers on other airlines to make good the loss, but neither activity ever occurred…



Now, I understand that Spirit is one of the most heavily discounted airlines in the world, and that they don’t manage to offer cheap airfares because they have little airplane fairies working for them. They pull off both their operational and financial performance by pinching pennies harder than anyone else in their industry, and all of these games with the cancelled flights are only what you should expect when you attempt to do business with a “low bidder” as low as they are. We can also understand their CEO’s attitude in refusing to extend any loyalty to customers who have no history with the company and are only flying with Spirit because of the low price. Neither partner in such a relationship is extending any loyalty, in fact; the customers are only doing business with Spirit because it is cheaper to do so, and the company is not likely to run out of people who want to travel but don’t want to pay for doing so – unless they keep doing things like this, of course…



In all of the years I have been observing (and making snarky comments about) bad business practices, this is the only occasion I can remember in which a company accepted money from customers, refused to provide the service that had been paid for, and refused to fully refund the money – without being shut down by the Federal authorities while Law Enforcement personnel took all of their executives away to jail. I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen anything to compare to knowing that upcoming flights had been cancelled and still selling seats on them in the first place, but this behavior on the company’s part was so bad that people are now complaining to Congress about it, and there may be an investigation in the next few weeks. This just leaves us with the question of what the company thought it was doing – other than racing to the bottom of how you treat your customers, that is…