Opinion: Humans are hard-wired to choose between fight and flight, but increasingly modern air travel demands both simultaneously.
The aggravation, stress and loss of all normal agency entailed in catching a plane would not be tolerated in any other modern transaction.
A single air traffic control glitch in London has caused global disruption for weeks. This was almost not news, since the inconvenience was not a novel experience for any of the passengers involved.
In any other situation, what ensued would be classified variously as theft, kidnapping, extortion, reckless endangerment and fraud. For travellers, it’s just what airlines are allowed to do to them: take their money and then muck them around at will. You’d as soon get a kidney donation as a refund.
Never mind the emergency, an everyday occurrence was highlighted when the crime writer Sir Ian Rankin grumped about being downgraded because British Airways had oversold its business-class tickets. This might fall into the category of First-World problems except that in no other First-World business sector would this be legal. I
f instead of business-class tickets to Athens, Rankin had ordered and paid for a Mercedes six months ago to be ready in August, he would not have arrived at the dealership to be told they’d sold his Merc to someone else and he’d have to make do with a Holden and a couple of vouchers. Lawyers would become involved, and if the dealership was thought to make a habit of double-selling its cars and pocketing a fat margin, the police would swiftly have followed.
The rationale for overselling is the long-established statistical ratio of no-shows, and airlines insist that only a tiny percentage of booked passengers are bumped. But how is this reasonable? The airline’s not out of pocket if people who’ve bought tickets don’t show up. Delayed passengers pay most dearly, with the irreplaceable currency of their time.
Once tempers abate, no one could rationally object to precautionary safety issues disrupting the timetable. But much of the inconvenience is deliberately built into the airlines’ business model by their decision to recruit and retain insufficient staff to meet their advertised timetables. Supposedly, this is in the interests of cost-cutting and profit maximisation.
What an irony, then, that Ryanair, possibly the meanest of all airlines – it once considered coin-operated toilets on its planes – showed the fiscal folly of dropping staff. It kept enough people on during Covid-19 to be back up and running faster than competitors. It’s now one of the few carriers expanding quickly, and still among the cheapest. It’s no more nor less reliable than other carriers but at least it doesn’t pretend that delays aren’t business as usual.
You half expect huntaways and collies nipping your bum rather than liveried ground staff in attendance, as boarding Ryanair is the same experience as milling about in a succession of pens prior to being dipped.
There’s no other business, either, that gets to literally imprison people at will. Get caught ram-raiding a dairy and you’ll at least be read your rights before you’re locked up. Board a plane or enter a gate “lounge” for a flight that loses its landing slot and it’s nigh-on martial law. You could be detained there for minutes or hours. They seldom say. There’s no parole.
Here’s an idea that might tempt the justice system, given the cost and recidivism factor of imprisonment and home detention. Booking serious crims on a succession of British Airways flights would consign them to randomly prolonged lounge and tarmac sequestration. It would confine hardened offenders in close quarters with an even scarier class of person: the frustrated tourist with miserable children in tow. Watch reoffending rates plummet.
