...And Here, Darn it, Are The Heartbreakers

Final Compilations by ANN Editor-In-Chief/Corporate Insomniac, Jim Campbell

It is both the most "fun," and most difficult task, facing the ANN staff at the end of every year -- determining who, or what, did the most to promote the cause of aviation in the past 365 days... while also chastising those people or entities that did all they could to undermine the many successes the aerospace community has managed to accomplish.

Alas, 2008 saw more than its fair share of downers, aviation-wise. Sure, "stuff" happens... but a few folks, issues, or entities seemed to go out of their way to create problems for the world of aviation.

So... it is ANN's annual obligation to recognize Ten of our Aero-Heartbreakers for 2008... in something of an informal order, starting from the 1st to the 10th.

Let us know what you think of our selections... whom YOU would have liked be included, or omitted, from such a list. In the meantime, we hope those who had something to do with this year's selections think a little more positively about the welfare of this industry, so that future lists become harder and harder to catalog.

Be it ignorance, arrogance or just plain incompetence, these were the folks or topics that made our lot a whole lot more difficult and immeasurably injured the aviation world in the past year.

Shame on those issues, folks, or groups that made our lot so much tougher in 2008...

Sinking Fast: Airline Extremes

Basic customer service dictates that one produces the best product for the most reasonable price in order to have some sense of success in the business world. Other tenets of basic customer service would seem to put forth concepts like courtesy, truthfulness, value, and some sense of competitive spirit that actually suggests that they want our business to begin with.

It can easily be said that the current iteration of the airline world knows very little about customer service and much less than it seemed to have known just a few years ago. In a day and age when dollars are harder to come by, belts are tightening, and getting from point A to point B is getting more difficult/arduous/painful by the day; one would think that the airline world would be doing everything it possibly can to make its services attractive, and valuable, pleasant, and competitive. I mean… when business conditions aren't the greatest; don't you put your best foot forward so that customers will consider YOUR services before all others?

Aero-News transports a lot of its personnel each year via the airlines, spending tens of thousands of dollars in the process… and it has been our experience that the airline industry is possibly the greatest impediment that we have, as a business, to getting our work done.

We have had to endure poor or nonexistent service, unexplained delays, rude and abusive personnel, personnel that were even absent from where they should have been (including gates with no staffing in the hour before their flight time and in cases as much as an hour past the scheduled flight time - right, Northwest?), additional fees that were poorly explained and often arbitrarily or improperly implemented, damage and or loss of our equipment, airplanes with defective seats and other accoutrements, onboard personnel who would ignore the simplest request, flight schedules that were mostly works of fiction, flight cancellations announced with little or no warning (often with explanations that proved to be false… right, Air Tran, Southwest, United, and USAir?), extensive delays in retrieving baggage when in fact it actually did arrive with our flight (but was thereafter "misplaced"), excessive hold times on the phone for the simplest requests, arbitrary changes in flight fees (online) that often were changed between the minuscule seconds between when we decided on a flight and when we tried to book it just a few keystrokes later (can anyone say "bait and switch"), ad nauseum. Whatever horrifying airline story you may have heard, we can tell it for ourselves, because we've experienced it -- and God help us all we've had to, collectively, pay several hundred thousand dollars over the course of a number of years for this abuse.

Today's airline travel system has all the charm and class of a dilapidated Greyhound bus station, and if the ' turn your head and cough' crap that occurs with each security checkpoint wasn't enough to totally turn you off on airline travel, the conduct of today's airlines are sure to do it. Today's airline transport system is broke… it doesn't work, it's thoroughly unpleasant, it is inordinately expensive in ways that are not disclosed at the outset, and the process of traveling has evolved from what used to be an adventure, into something ugly that must be endured.

Yes, some airlines do better than others… from the absolute gutter of US Air and Northwest to the pinnacle of Southwest and Virgin America Airlines, there is no question that the airlines can and should do better -- but we as consumers still buy this shoddy service. Instead, we should vote/protest with our dollars… in other words, buying services from those airlines that attempt to demonstrate some proper positive semblance of good customer service and business behavior -- and ignoring/avoiding those that do not.

As soon as the air traveler gets wise to the power that they wield in voting with their dollars, we can make ourselves heard; but until then the airline industry will continue to abuse and ignore the needs of its clientele and eventually destroy itself.

Rarely have we watched an industry do such a thorough and dispassionate job of killing itself. We hope that the damage they have done to themselves is not permanent, but to be perfectly honest, we're not optimistic.

FMI: www.airlines.org