Attention All Passengers Read Online Free Page B

finding
most of them in less than five page clicks. (A notable exception is JetBlue,
which has provided the most customer service transparency in the industry since
its Valentine’s Day weekend operational meltdown in 2007, when 1,100 flights
were canceled.) I have personally found that airline call center employees and
even airport personnel usually have no idea what these contracts are, let alone
what they dictate.
    Not that clear explanations will help. “It’s really
a unilateral contract, not a bilateral contract,” says passenger advocate Kate
Hanni. And sometimes the legalese can be just plain misleading. In July 2010 a
Southwest Airlines executive corrected a “misinterpretation” over the term
“mechanical difficulties” being included in its (long) list of force majeure
(“act of God”) flight delay conditions; he explained the “added verbiage”
referred only to mechanical difficulties outside the airline’s control, such as
a broken airport deicing system, and not aircraft problems. The incident
underscored just how confusing such “added verbiage” can be for passengers.
    Then again, many of these “employees” are not
employees at all, a topic I discussed with Anolik. And he clearly relishes
torturing the industry: “When I’m early for a flight I’ll ask, ‘Can I see your
denied-boarding policy?’ And the person working will have no idea. You’re right,
they don’t know the rules anymore.”
    Airline industry old-timers—both employees and
passengers—still invoke the days of the Rule 240 clause, a holdover from the
regulated era in which the government spelled out specifically how airlines were
required to meet their passengers’ needs. It was clear and concise for all
passengers and uniformly fair for all carriers, but Anolik said Rule 240 is no
longer mandatory in the deregulated era.
    However, I believe it’s time to write a new Rule
240, for the twenty-first century. That’s why when I became a member of the FAAC
I urged the DOT to adopt procedures similar to those employed by the European
Union. The EU’s rules are clear, cogent, and easy for every passenger to
understand, particularly if they download a color-coded chart that indicates
uniform compensation for airline mistreatment. This isn’t to suggest that the
European model should be copied outright, but it certainly provides a decent
blueprint for us. As travel ombudsman Linda Burbank notes, “They have better
transparency in Europe. In America it’s about flying Darwin Air.”
    As a last recourse, passengers can still file a
formal complaint against a domestic airline with the DOT. Though many consumers
undoubtedly respond with a “What’s the point?” attitude about such a pro forma
task, Anolik noted that it’s really quite important: “Unless they hear from
passengers, the DOT will say, ‘We don’t have any complaints on file.’ ”
    Loads of Fun? Airlines Emulate
Troop Carriers
    One mechanic for a legacy carrier—so-called
because these large airlines predated deregulation—summed it up: “If you’re
flying full planes and you can’t make money, you shouldn’t run an airline.” And
yet that’s exactly what we have. My own theory is that the airline industry’s
decision to fill all these planes has had a direct effect on making flying more
miserable: more boarding delays, more mishandled bags, more consumer complaints,
more air rage.
    During World War II, when commercial airlines were
pressed into service as de facto military transports, planes were fuller than at
any time before or since, with average passenger load factors—the percentage of
occupied seats—reaching nearly 90 percent. After 1946, it took the U.S. airline
industry more than fifty years to crack the 70 percent mark again. By 2009, load
factors reached 80 percent, and