Sometimes it’s not actually the airline’s fault. It’s yours.
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I had recently boarded an American Airlines flight at Phoenix when one of my own travel pet peeves crept upon me. Boarding was complete, the aircraft door was closed, all the ground service equipment I could see through the window had been pulled away, and we were ready to go. But go we didn’t; instead, we sat there on the ramp, waiting. Minute after minute ticked by, without any acknowledgement of the delay by the pilots.
This is a quirk, I find, relatively specific to American Airlines. Every airline has its style. At United, it’s overcommunication—announcements from the cockpit, updates on the app, updates via text, even for short delays. You’re always told “just a few more bags” or “there are a couple of aircraft ahead of us on the taxiway.” Alaska and Delta also tend to have their pilots be pretty chatty for small delays, as do many European carriers. American Airlines’ preference, it seems, is silence.
I understand that. I’ve worked in the travel industry for 25 years and have been a travel agent typing furiously into a “green screen” to build manual itineraries and stitch together low fares. I’ve been in airline customer service, both at the airport and in the reservations call center. I’ve worked in tech support, fixing complicated reservations; in customer relations, answering complaints by phone and email; and in network planning, scheduling aircraft, and analyzing route-level profitability.
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So, when American leans toward silence for shorter delays, I know why. The explanation of why doesn’t always reflect well on the airline, because it’s usually a pretty complex explanation that gets telephoned into a simpler reason that makes the airline look far less competent than they are. Why take the time to explain that boarding will be delayed by a few minutes because a pilot is inbound on another flight that was delayed due to weather? Especially, when half the passengers in the boarding area will go back to their phone calls and say, “Oh, the flight’s delayed because the pilot didn’t show up to work.”
Travelers Just Love to Complain About Airlines
I see a lot of whining on social media and in person at airports about things that airlines do that are absolutely commonplace, and have been for years.
“They wouldn’t let me move to a better seat for free,” travelers tend to complain, to which I say: How dare they charge more for better things.
“I can’t believe they charged me to check a bag!” To which I’d respond: They’ve been doing that for almost twenty years, and that information is easily accessible.
“The legroom is so bad,” is a popular complaint. Well, I’d say: If only they had better seats, you could pay extra for.
“The flight is overbooked; this airline has no idea what they’re doing,” is yet another grievance often seen, to which I’d fire back: Overbooking is a common practice, and airlines are required by law to inform passengers that they do it, and when it happens.
Henry Harteveldt, founder and president of Atmosphere Research Group, has plenty of experience working in the industry himself. Harteveldt led marketing efforts at several airlines and notes that frivolous passenger complaints have been around for decades.
“Look at how comics in the 1960s—now considered to be a part of the supposed ‘Golden Age of Flying’—would make jokes at airlines’ expense,” he says.
Harteveldt also recounted a time when he worked at Continental Airlines and a passenger sitting next to him in the economy cabin mentioned she thought it was unfair that first class passengers had wider seats and more legroom. More recently, waiting to board an American Airlines flight, he overheard a passenger who shared she had purchased a basic economy fare complain to her traveling companion that she didn’t think it was fair that American offered earlier boarding groups to first class passengers or elite frequent fliers.
In fact, passenger complaints about disparate treatment by class have been studied extensively. A 2016 study found that air rage incidents were significantly more common onboard airlines that have a first class cabin. That study suggested it was the slight indignity of walking through first class to coach that set some passengers on a path to disruption.
Dumping Our Travel Traumas
Working in customer relations (for an airline without a first class cabin), I saw a fair amount of how passengers respond to a variety of situations (usually they’re calling or emailing frustrated). And to be honest, a lot of times they’re completely justified. Airlines are systems run by fallible humans, and they don’t always get it right. But most of the time, they do. Yet passengers are just itching, it seems, to uncover some sort of meanness, incompetence, or duplicity on the part of airlines.
At a recent dinner, another diner at my table shared her frustration with Air France for not letting her into their airline lounge in Paris because she had a Delta Air Lines ticket. Airline lounge access (and crowding) are hot topics in the industry, and curious, I pressed her for more information. Just having a Delta ticket isn’t reason enough to deny someone who is otherwise entitled to lounge access.
Was she traveling in business class, or was she an elite frequent flier? No, she said. Oh, perhaps she had a Delta SkyClub membership or a Delta American Express card—it’s such a common misconception that those cards also allow access to Air France lounges that the airline posts large signs at the entrances to some of its Paris lounges clarifying their policy. No, to all of it, she said.
In the end, I was able to determine that she was being denied access not because of what she had (a Delta ticket), but because of what she didn’t have (any sort of ticket or membership that included lounge access). Yet, even without any sort of entitlement to receive that service, she remained furious that Air France simply wouldn’t let her in.
Over the years, I’ve debated with passengers whether airlines are justified in charging fare differences for more expensive tickets, or whether airlines are being unfair by charging higher fares during peak travel periods like Christmas. In one particularly memorable situation, I had a passenger attempt to convince me that the fare rules don’t apply to them because they hadn’t read them.
I also see a lot of blame assigned to specific airlines for things that are in no way specific to that airline. I hear a lot of “This airline is awful—they didn’t realize our plane was broken until right before boarding.” I can assure you that this exact situation happens to all airlines.
Oftentimes, there’s a healthy amount of conjecture involved: “They knew it was broken all night and they didn’t tell us until after we boarded!” I’m not saying that’s never happened, but you’re filling in a lot of gaps there.
Certainly, much of this behavior is a result of frustration, stemming from both the delay and the lack of control over the situation. When we fly, we’re putting our faith in airlines to get us to our destinations on time with as little hassle as possible, and when that doesn’t happen, there’s very little we can do about it.
Looking for Someone to Blame
When we get frustrated, we look for blame—it’s more comforting than just writing everything off to circumstance. Instead of throwing up our hands and saying, “Well, that happened and that sucked,” we want to draw a line under it by finding an explanation, and the most frequent one we land on in our ruminations is to find fault: “It’s because the airline is lazy/incompetent/mean.”
I think a better explanation is that aviation is complex (and making money as a business flying airplanes is actually pretty hard). A few years ago, I was flying from Dallas to San Antonio when the gate agent informed me that the flight was weight-restricted and might leave some standby passengers behind, even though the flight wasn’t fully booked. Weight restrictions aren’t common on short 737 flights from Dallas, particularly on days when it’s not hot out.
Curious, I mentioned I worked for the airline and asked what the situation was. Seemingly relieved I would understand the explanation and not dumb it down in a way that made them look bad, they explained that the inbound aircraft was held up by weather in west Texas, so they’d found a replacement aircraft that had been scheduled to go to New York. New York is a much longer flight from Dallas than San Antonio, and that aircraft had already taken on a fuel load for the longer flight.
Aircrafts are designed to land much lighter than they take off, because they burn off fuel during flight. If you have more fuel onboard than you need, you’ll shed less weight in flight and land overweight. This isn’t unsafe (fully fueled 737s can easily turn around and land again if needed—unlike larger jets, they don’t have the ability to jettison fuel), but it’s also not something pilots can plan to do during normal airline operations. The choice was either to offload fuel, which would take half an hour and delay the flight for everyone, or to leave some standbys to take the next flight.
It’s not a common situation, but it wasn’t any sort of huge mistake or crafty coverup. Yet, I heard the man in line behind me, who had overheard part of the agent’s explanation, turn to the guy behind him and say, “Did you hear that? They messed up, and the plane has too much fuel—how does that even happen?” Sir, you seem awfully bothered that this flight will leave on time; do you need a hug?
There’s a distinct privilege in dumping our travel traumas on the air carriers that fly us. Most of us buy airline tickets because we don’t know how to fly jet airplanes. And if we do, we can’t afford the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars needed to acquire these magnificent machines constructed of rare earth elements that whisk us across continents and oceans in living room comfort at speeds and altitudes that were the stuff of science fiction fantasy just a handful of generations ago.
So maybe my seat’s a little uncomfortable, and I don’t know why we haven’t moved yet, and I wasn’t allowed to get on the plane first. I’ll deal with it.