“Good morning and welcome to Omaha and American Airlines. Gee, sorry to say that your flight to Chicago has been canceled because we left the plane on all night and the battery is dead. Please stand in line and wait for a ticket agent to describe your bad alternatives.”
I could stay at the Super 8 and get there the next day. But I am supposed to speak at a film festival in Vermont, headlined by the documentary “Storm Lake.” I could take an afternoon flight and get there late at night. The film folks are freaking. Give me the red-eye. We get to Chicago and storms ground all planes. God’s mistake, not human, so I can live with it until the clouds part. I hit the pillow at 2:30 a.m., having been up since 4 a.m. God Bless Monica McKenna, daughter of Storm Lake native Don McKenna, for picking me up.
Vermont is lovely, and hotter than Hades. “But it’s never like this,” the locals explain. Get used to it. The hotel is historic, the staff hospitable, the film audience enthusiastic. “It’s a gift to me,” said a widow from New Jersey whose husband was a newspaper editor.
It was the first time I saw the film on the big screen. I had seen the finished version once before. The woman next to me shoved her Kleenex stash at me. It made the journey worth it.
Middlebury is a quaint place of 8,000 at the foot of the Green Mountains where the economy is built increasingly on an elite college, tourism and corporate dairy. It’s also noisy. They do street construction at night, beneath the hotel window. All the trucks use jake brakes at all hours. Noise pollution prevents sleep, makes people edgy and leads to species extinction.
We go to the airport and get on the plane for Detroit, intending to connect back to Omaha.
“Welcome to Detroit and Delta Airlines. Gee, sorry, but it looks like your flight will be delayed because our lights won’t work and the backup power supply appears to be shot. Getting right on it! We will let you know. Please have a tiny bottle of water and some tiny pretzels from the airplane on us.” And some Valium?
A thousand purgatorial hours later, the mechanics saunter away and we board the plane for Husker Holler.
“Welcome aboard, this is the flight deck. Just looking for some bags. Thanks for your patience. We will taxi shortly.”
“This is the captain again. We’re about ready for takeoff. But it appears we need some more fuel. So it will be just a while longer.”
Check the o-rings while you’re at it.
Is this a joke? A series of mini-strikes? We know that the pilots, stewards and guys waving the sticks are fed up with management. Or is it just all-around sclerosis from a system not able to deal with the pandemic shock? After all, we greased the system with federal relief. What happened?
Well, there isn’t enough help. You wonder why, because nobody provides an answer. Lovely daughter Clare tried to fly American and had a flight canceled — among 3,000 that week — and was not refunded her full fare. I asked in a modulated tone that the ticket agent reflect that concern to management. She chortled. “There are a lot of concerns I would like to reflect to management.” And then she went on to the next complainer.
She was worn out just like me.
Flights used to be rare and they served cocktails. Then came deregulation in 1978. Old incumbents like Braniff gave way to new competitors like Southwest. You could fly anywhere from Omaha so long as you can put up with O’Hare. And it was cheap. But …
Planes are maintained in China. Flights are routinely overbooked. Profits are maximized, service minimized. Consumers pay the price by being stuck in Detroit eating a stale $13 chicken sandwich.
Most flights go through on time. My trip from Fort Dodge to Chicago recently was a snap. Yet more and more people are getting caught when the system locks up with increasing frequency. The frustrated customers are often the people who run government. Bernie Sanders had to fly out of Cedar Rapids last weekend — you know he wasn’t happy.
There must be some sort of reckoning on behalf of passengers, workers and safety. Clearly, the industry needs help as it drives people mad — stewards had to duct tape a traveler to a seat, attendants are getting assaulted, pilots are overworked. Everyone is so shot they forget to turn off the silver bird.
The show must go on, so I will get on an airplane again and play the odds. Anything to hear the audience when Dolores eats toast with a rabbit.
Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). The documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, will appear Nov. 15 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2021
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us