You know those guys you see getting on planes with big shoulder bags that couldn’t possibly be made to fit in those little test boxes they put by the gates that everybody ignores? I’m one of them, for good reason: whenever I check luggage, something goes wrong.
Take yesterday, for example. I was out late Friday night, and we were scheduled for a two and a half hour layover in O’Hare airport in Chicago, and I just couldn’t cope with the idea of lugging my big bag all over that deeply unpleasant airport (about which more later). The larger of my two bags was just full of dirty laundry and conference give-aways, though, so I decided to check it. Even if they lost it, as I was almost sure they would, I wouldn’t be out much.
The airline gods found a new way to make this blow up in my face, though:
I booked my tickets through Air Canada, but the return flights were actually on United. Of course, the itinerary I got from Air Canada only lists the Air Canada flight numbers, not the United code share. But the itinerary gives a time for the connecting flight’s departure: 5:45. When we got to Chicago, there was a 6:00 flight to Albany, so I figured that was it.
It turns out, however, that the code-share flight was moved to 7:30. I found this out when I tried to board the 6:00 flight. Which wasn’t full, but they couldn’t let me on it because… I had checked a bag for the 7:30 flight.
To paraphrase Apocalypse Now, Never check a bag. Absolutely God damn never check a bag.
The extra hour and a half I got to spend in O’Hare was nicely emblematic of just how unpleasant modern air travel has become. It’s not just the intrusive “security” screening, it’s everything about the process. It’s like the airlines are working from some sort of demonic script to make the process of getting from Point A to Point B as soul-crushing and dehumanizing as possible.
The obvious starting place is the seats, which are packed in tighter than ever, at a time when the flying population is fatter than ever. If I fly in a regular coach seat, I can either take an aisle seat, and spend the entire flight being bumped by passengers and flight attendants going up and down the aisles, or I can try to wedge my 6’6″ frame into a window seat, from which there is basically no escape in flight.
It used to be possible to get exit row seats and know that there would at least be adequate leg room, but in their effort to bring class war to the masses, most major airlines now reserve those seats for their “elite” passangers. They’re not available to schlubs like me, even though I actually need the room. In a charming new wrinkle, United now allows you to pay extra for “Economy Plus” seats (provided, of course, that there weren’t enough elite passengers on the flight to use them up immediately), so for an extra $50 or so I can buy myself barely adequate space for my legs, though there’s still the wearying process of wrestling for the arm rest, and getting whacked in the arm by the drink cart.
On the flight itself, there are no longer any real services. On the three-and-a-half hour flight from Calgary to Chicago, I got a bag of pretzels. The flight left at 11:45, so like everybody else, I had to buy my own food at the airport, and paid $6 for the worst turkey sandwich I have ever purchased from a professional food service operation. The four-plus hour flight from Toronto to Calgary offered food for purchase only, so I got the right to pay $5 for a pretty mediocre BBQ beef sandwich (which was the best of the available options).
And yet, despite cutting every imaginable corner and squeezing every nickel possible out of their coach passengers, the major airlines somehow still manage to lose money by the truckload. It’s hard for me to grasp the bottomless incompetence that this must require– given the number of fat and cranky people they pack onto planes these days, you’d think they could turn a profit just by accident.
On top of that, airports have gotten more unpleasant than ever. There isn’t a halfway comfortable chair anywhere in O’Hare, and there are only two places in the entire airport where you can sit down and get a meal. Neither of them is in the C concourse, so my dinner last night was food court Chinese eaten with inadequate plastic utensils while perched on the edge of a naugahyde plastic bench molded into a shape that can’t possibly be a comfortable fit for any actual human backside. They offer wireless Internet access, but not only is it $6.95 per day (which I would’ve paid happily yesterday– I paid more than that for the hotel Internet access in Calgary), but it requires you to download and install software in order to get it to work, and tehre’s not a chance in hell that I’ll agree to that.
Next year’s DAMOP meeting is being hosted by Penn State. I think I’ll be driving to that one.