Most of these are out of the range of most people to do anything about, or anything substantial. And on the global scale, one crisis is swallowed by the next; it’s as much as patience and the internet can do to keep up with them.
Lesser matters may seem and are in fact trivial compared to them. Which is not, nor was it ever meant to be, that they can or should be ignored. Yet, as the example I offer here and hope will demonstrate, so many are ignored and have been.
Lesser torments ignored grow to greater ones. Irritations swell to invasions of dignity. The barely tolerable inflates to the absolutely unbearable. And some things are just so rotten I wonder how and why we have put up with them so long.
My subject is airports and airlines. They have become and are sinkholes of the most insupportable annoyance, frustration—and for passengers—sites of what I shall call commanded helplessness.
Let me record, and with some force, that some people working at airports—the check-in clerks, the baggage handlers, the security people—some of these are as helpful and as pleasant and as humane as any group of human beings working in an environment that at times can and does become hellish. Some others, of course, are not. In every mix of human beings that divide is permanent.
However, the airport, as contrasted with any other commercial operation, runs to different rules. Since the 9/11 terror attack, the airport and the airport authorities, and the airline and the airlines managers, hold all the cards.
There is some reason for this, but there is no reason to take the special status of the airport and use it to abandon all normal regard, courtesy, civility, understanding, and responsible communication for the thousands upon thousands of people who fly each day.
In Vancouver just a few days ago there was a snowstorm—certainly a snowstorm by Vancouver standards. The airport wasn’t ready, not ready at all. You know the result. Flights cancelled by the dozen and passengers stranded by at least the many hundreds. Family trips for Christmas interrupted and lost.
And as always is the case when a storm hits an airport, it’s the same utterly predictable wholesale mess.
Let me exemplify. The news reports are always the same. “If you’re travelling to the airport, please check with your airline before leaving home.”
Question One: Have you ever tried to call an airline during what they call a “storm event?” The only purpose of a phone on such days is to give the passenger something to throw at a wall after waiting for hours—hours—to get a message which assures you that “your call is important to us.”
“Your call is important to us” is the most malignant, atrocious, transparent lie in all of commerce. If it were important, someone would actually answer. The ninth or fiftieth repetition of this claim proves the point.
No one EVER answers. Ears cauliflower, blood pressure rises, the awful commercials for your next “FlyVacation” do their endless loop.
To all TV and radio stations: do not, as a pure mercy, “advise” travellers to call their airline. Tell them instead to take many pills and go to bed. An airline phone number, when you need to call it, is as useless as sunglasses on a bat.
Question Two: What is the purpose of the state-of-the-art sound systems in all airports during a rough period? I know what it is NOT their purpose: to tell those caught in delays or cancellations or waiting for a change in flight ANYTHING.
While passengers with shattered nerves are tending bored children, tired from the one flight that got them to this particular airport, trying to phone relatives about when they MIGHT get a flight out, keeping an eye on their baggage (if they have their baggage), that same grand sound system exists to stay silent, to utter random bursts of non-information spread over long periods of time. There is no place that shares so little necessary information to people bursting to hear where they stand as an airport. Spy networks are more open.
Airport communication during such moments is abysmal beyond reckoning. And it is always the case, and has been the case for at least 20 years.
Question Three: This concerns the deepest, most ruinous of all airport experiences. Your flight is boarding. In your heart, as you look around the airport at all the sad, frustrated, tired, and anxious faces, angels are singing. The angels have brought out their best harps and their most melodious sopranos. You (mildly and silently) commiserate with the “lost ones,” but you at least are boarding. YOU are going to make it, and Uncle Jim and Grandma Egan will be so happy to see you over Christmas.
You stride with a smile past the agents, you have your ID and your pass. You enter the plane. You take—hey, it really doesn’t matter this time—the middle seat.
Poor silly fool you. As was empirically the case in Vancouver this past week, many who boarded were left bound as by gravity and superglue on the tarmac for 7 hours, for 9 hours, for 11 hours!
Why are airlines permitted to keep human beings in a sealed cigar tube for unimaginably extended periods of time? While once in an hour, maybe two, they feed over the intercom the various excuses (“landing gear” “de-icing delay” “baggage check”) for why you are parked, you sit fidgeting, keep hoping, and getting hungrier.
It’s always the same sadistic tease. They will promise it’s only an hour more, then announce—how could this have been foreseen?—crew changes, and finally, after 7 or 9 or 11 hours, let the livestock out of the pen and back into the airport terminal. Which could have been done hours and hours and hours earlier.
Where, at least, the passengers can breathe again, go to washrooms, stand up and move limbs close to coma.
No airline should have the unchallenged right to park passengers for interminable duration for—this has to be the only reason—its own convenience. And has anyone in an airline ever explained why passengers are kept on airplanes for such long hours? What is the point, and why can’t they deplane?
Question Four, and the final one. I have but touched upon the various miseries and indignities airports and airlines impose with sinister regularity on their “thank you for choosing ...” customers.
The “rebooking of the flight” purgatory I have left untouched. The “sleeping at the airport” endurance test I have neglected. The false promises that you are booked on another flight, I chose to pass by. As also, and this is very important, the extra costs that those people who cannot afford “extra costs” and who “saved” for this one-flight-a-year, have to bear and cannot bear.
My Fourth Question is this: How come this is allowed, has gone on so long, and why do the airline companies repeat their ill and desperate performance every single time the same things happen? And as a subsidiary question, is there any meaning at all to the phrase “passengers’ rights?”
Other than a massive and cruel joke.
