“Open letter to airlines: We hate you”

I rarely stray from talking about movies, TV, stories, etc. But I think that TV writer Ken Levine, he of the excellent blog …by Ken Levine: The World as Seen by a TV Comedy Writer, speaks for us all in this rant on a subject not so near and dear to our hearts: the state of the airline industry. Or more specifically, how horrible it is nowadays to fly. Some excerpts:

I’m up in the Bay Area this weekend. On Friday I tried to check in on line on Southwest Airlines. Pre-check-in site was down, but it said if this continues to call and they provided a number. So after three hours of trying I called the number. Had to wait fifteen minutes. When I finally got someone she said the system is down and there’s nothing she could do. I said, “So why did it say to call this number?” She said, “So we can tell you the system is down.” I said, “I know that. It’s obvious. You’re making people wait fifteen minutes to tell them something they already know.” “Yes sir”, she said proudly.

And this is one of the GOOD airlines.

An article came out Friday saying that three major airlines made a big profit the last quarter. First time since 2007. How’d they do it? By reducing flights and cutting back on passenger services.

They don’t give you blankets but they do continue to spend billion of dollars annually on splashy ad campaigns trying to get our business. “Friendly Skies”, “Doing what we do best”, blah blah blah. . And no one’s buying it. In fact, WE ALL HATE YOU.

Traveling is now an ordeal and you’re a big part of it. Security lines are unpleasant but that’s fifteen minutes. The rest of the six hour wisdom tooth extraction is all you.

I used to love to fly. Probably in my genes. My grandfather was a pilot in the Navy. My father was a pilot in the Air Force. But flying on a commercial jet nowadays is an almost repulsive experience. 

You can read the rest of Ken Levine’s rant here.

UPDATE: In thinking about it, I wonder if there’s a movie premise here? A guy who takes a flight and after a series of degrading experiences at the hands of an airline, he just loses it. A riff off the movie Falling Down… only I guess in this case, it could be really a case of falling down, as in the airplane’s descent. Or perhaps the guy makes it his personal mission to screw with the airline’s CEO. Huge target audience in that I don’t know anyone who likes flying commercial.

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