The Unfriendly Skies.(The Talk of the Town)(airline management)

In the summer of 1999, after a series of highly publicized customer-service debacles, the nation's major airlines collectively promised Congress that they would revamp their operations, offering a "service commitment" that they dubbed "Customers First." Eight years later, airline passengers are waiting in vain for any sign of that promise's being kept. They're also waiting in vain, period. This summer, nearly a third of all flights have been arriving late, more flights have been cancelled, many planes are overbooked, and, in June, reports of baggage problems were up twenty-five per cent from last year. A service commitment like this should probably be called "Customers Last."

The airlines' explanation for the sheer misery of flying is that the important problems--bad weather and an antiquated air-traffic-control system, resulting in overcrowded runways--are out of their hands. But those unavoidable difficulties have been exacerbated by the airlines' strategic choices, most notably their decision to cut the number of workers they employ and the number of big planes they fly. Over the past six years, airlines have laid off more than a hundred thousand workers, around a sixth of their workforce, and six major carriers have shrunk their fleets--planes are expensive not only to acquire but to maintain--by twenty per cent. From an economic point of view, this was sensible. Making money in the airline business has always been tough--Warren Buffett has said that if captialists had been present at the Wright brothers' first flight they would have been well advised to shoot the plane down--but the years following 9/11, in which the industry lost more than thirty billion dollars and several airlines filed for bankruptcy, were especially brutal. So airlines moved aggressively to cut the fat out of their business, trying to insure that each of their planes flew as many flights, while carrying as many passengers, as possible. The strategy was so successful that, even as business has recovered, the airlines have chosen to stay slim. As a result, planes today are more crowded than before--last year, the airlines filled seventy-nine per cent of their seats, compared with sixty-five per cent in the mid-nineties--and forecasts suggest that the industry as a whole may clear four billion dollars in profits this year.

The lean-and-mean approach may have saved the airlines, but for passengers it's made an already bad situation worse. If something goes wrong with a plane, servicing it will likely take longer than it used to, and there's less chance that another jet will be available to get passengers where they need to go. And since the planes the airlines do own are flying more flights, the ripple effects of delays have been magnified: a third of all flight delays are due simply to the fact that the plane was late arriving from its previous flight, and often the effects of a mid-morning flight's late arrival can still be felt that evening. According to ...