The new gig doesn’t have nearly as much travel involved. The previous job saw me spending half of my time either in the air getting somewhere, or sitting on my canasta, waiting to get into the air. This week, I got to revisit air travel for the first time since the end of January when I flew to Seattle. Here are my impressions:
Air travel has actually gotten worse: I didn’t think it was possible, but air travel has now become a complete multi-sensory affront. You want a pillow or blanket? Two dollars please. You want a free half-can of Coke? Show me your boarding pass and if you’re not Super Mondo Extra Special Grade ticket, then gimme a buck. You want a printed out ticket? Ohhh that’s twenty five dollars.
Simply put, it has become as hideous as intercity bus travel, but with a longer safety briefing. The aircraft were uniformly dirty inside and out. The lavatories on each leg I flew smelled like a combination of waste products and some kind of chemical designed to almost, but not quite, mask the smell.
The flight crew dare not show their faces to customers. I saw one flight crew dart from the cockpit to the jetway and back. He had the same expression as someone doing a perp walk in front of the press after being arrested for indecent behavior with a penguin. Had he thought to wear his jacket, I’m sure he would have pulled it up over his head to hide his face.
The cabin crew, universally, have that hang-dog, beaten look one expects from aged carny workers or bank tellers. Gate agents look almost lifelike and behave the same way: Hand your boarding pass over. Show your ID. Don’t even try to make eye contact. They can’t see you. They are not allowed to see you, even if your head is on fire.
Routings? Mine wasn’t what you would call difficult. Toronto to Calgary to Thunder Bay to Toronto. Which wound up being Toronto to Calgary, then Edmonton, then Winnipeg, then Thunder Bay and then Toronto. Every leg, except the Toronto to Calgary was flown on the little Bombardier Regional Jets. All flights were packed to bursting.
What does this really mean? Air Canada, our putative flag carrier, just came out of the equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year. Air Canada ‘rationalized’ their service offerings. They ‘streamlined’ their routes. They ‘improved their competitiveness’ with other airlines. Nice jargon, isn’t it? If I was a stock broker/financial analyst jagoff, I’d feel all warm and gooey inside.
Service is now a sepia-tinted memory of Years Gone By: The Good Olde Days of 2005 when, if you asked nicely, you might get a bag of pretzels that were packaged during the Diefenbaker government. Perhaps, if you seemed nice, you could get a whole can of ginger ale. Gate agents would look up from their endless keyboarding to make eye contact. Oh how I long for those forgotten halcyon days of my youth.
I am fairly certain why things have deteriorated. An efficiency expert somewhere looked at the profitability of each passenger, measuring with a micrometer. Air Canada looked at their employees and figured they could threaten mass layoffs to beat them down. This would get the employees to take a pay cut, give up their pensions, increase their hours and adhere to new service standards that were ‘no service’, as service costs money.
Costs to the airline means that someone will have to be fired for jeopardizing corporate profitability. Every dollar is sacred and every penny scarce.
I shudder to think what is going on in the back when it comes to safety or maintenance. Those are two big costs the airlines can lasso without customers seeing the corners being cut with a chainsaw. I do know that the flight from Calgary to Thunder Bay, via Edmonton and Winnipeg was refueled twice, for brief periods. This tells me that the pilots had to run with the bare minimum of gas in the tanks and would only top up the smallest amount needed to get the airplane to the next stop.
In their defense, fuel has weight and aircraft weight/balance is a black art of higher math based on temperature, pressure, distance, passenger weight and altitude, but not that much. The fuel upload at Winnipeg was barely two minutes. Commercial pilots can’t call for gas without approval of flight dispatch and operations. You tell me.
At the end of day, now that I’m back in Mississauga, I want to find the ad agency Creative Director for Air Canada and make them take a flight in the cheap seats. Then make Monte Brewer, the head guy at Air Canada take a ride with me, incognito, on a typical flight. No special tickets. No business class. No advance warning.
I doubt if they would have the nerve or the sense to see what their service offerings are really like, not how they are accounted for on a balance sheet.
RoadDave 