The Morning Rant: MBAirlines - Air Travel is Broken

It’s no secret that air travel is completely broken, and the complaints I see online are growing in anger and desperation, including from many conservatives.

Like Mr. Sexton’s experience in the tweets above, a nightmare ordeal my wife and I recently had in trying to get from Airport A to Airport B is hardly unique. We’re certainly not the first persons to see the sun rise and subsequently set from the same terminal in the same day without ever taking off, but I do have some thoughts on the total breakdown of air travel:

• A cartel of airlines that carves up market share rather than competing for market share is not capitalism nor free enterprise, thus the airlines are not incentivized to compete or set themselves apart by being the carrier that consistently gets its customers to their destinations in accordance with the tickets being sold.

• The elite business school concept of increasing profit through cost cutting has virtually eliminated customer service in this service-intense industry. Rather than increasing profit through revenue growth, airline executives focus on mergers and expense reduction instead.

• Service is a product, but it is clearly seen as nothing more than an expense by airline executives. When flights are being cancelled, there is no one to talk to on the phone, and there are few if any available gate agents.

• I’ve twice recently had elderly relatives request wheelchair accommodations when they land, but none were there when they arrived. Whether it’s the airline’s responsibility or the airport’s responsibility to get the wheelchair there, it’s clear that airlines will take money from a senior to allow them to get from Point A to Point B, but the airlines then consider the burden of getting that senior from the jet bridge to baggage claim to be an unacceptable expense.

• While weather delays are an acceptable reason for delays and canceled flights, extended mechanical delays are not. If mechanical breakdowns are a predictable and accepted occurrence that “just happen” in this industry, there should be sufficient backup equipment available. I strongly suspect that corporate budget cutters consider any underutilized aircraft unacceptable rather than seeing those planes as a form of insurance to ensure that customers receive the service they paid for.

• Based on my air travel in recent years, mechanical delays have increased significantly. My recent nightmare trip was supposed to be a simple non-stop between two major airports, yet there were three separate mechanical delays involving two separate aircraft. The fact that mechanical delays are now routine indicates that there is an acceptance of relaxed aircraft maintenance, servicing, and inspection. That should be unacceptable in any industry, but it is a potentially deadly way to save money for an airline.

• I also understand that “mechanical delay” is also quite likely a euphemism for other snafus, since airline cost-cutters have made staffing and scheduling so brittle that any one interruption can ripple through the system, causing a broad failure. If this is the case, it also means that airlines have normalized lying to their customers. I don’t like to think about the ramifications of institutional dishonesty by a company whose product is traveling at 600 mph at an elevation of 30,000 feet.

• The contempt that airlines have for salary expense and for any expenses related to customer service is manifested in front-line employees no longer caring. Why should they? Since airline executives have made it abundantly clear that they have a spitting contempt for providing customer service and for paying employees to service those customers, why should airline employees care about the customer experience?

With Pete Buttigieg as the hapless figurehead of the Transportation Department, the situation only worsened over the preceding 4 years. But we now have a Republican Transportation Secretary and a Republican Congress. Air travel is deeply broken as the oligopoly of non-competitive carriers continues to cut service in pursuit of profit growth in the way our elite MBAs are taught – expense reduction. Perhaps it’s time for the party of free enterprise to intervene and break up this cartel. If the airline oligopoly is going to be allowed to perpetuate and further consolidate, then it is inviting further regulation to make it feel some pain in exchange for the cruelty it is inflicting on American air travelers.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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