Flying Out of Control
Some people rage against government taxes, others resent the old people who
are sucking dry our Social Security safety net even as they crankily vote down
local school budgets. Not me. I lie awake and worry about the national tragedy
that is the airline industry. I hate them all: the lackadaisical baggage
handlers who "accidentally" sent our luggage to a remote cargo area at JFK last
week, the surly steward(esse)s, the brazen caterers whose spongy chicken in
brown goo so shamelessly denigrates the memory of food. But most of all, I
obsess over the people whose duty it is to de-ice wings, coax the cargo hold
not to explode, and fix any smoking engines before takeoff. So of course you
are right; "simple" mechanical failure is scarier than terrorism because it
connotes a level of indifference that is no less evil than overt terrorism but
far more insidious. And even worse, it epitomizes the attitude of most airline
employees toward their customers. The passengers. Those people who are paying
hundreds of dollars or more--my ticket to Asia last month topped $1,000--for
the privilege of being herded like cattle onto a death trap over which no one
seems to have much control. Stop citing those statistics that show air travel
is safer than automobiles. The big difference is that auto accidents are
survivable. That's because auto accidents are, to some extent, controllable by
the travelers. The driver who hears a car engine making a bad whompety noise
has a choice: Pull off the highway or gut it out. The airplane passenger who,
like me, hears a nasty whirrrrrsh on takeoff and feels the seat shimmy as if
powered by Magic Fingers has no such choice. I must sit. And hope that the
pilot is better at his job than the baggage handlers are at theirs.
Despite the cultural leap that being an airplane passenger requires--as an
American, I have, after all, spent nearly four decades constructing an
elaborate illusion of how I control my life--I continue to fly. So far the
gamble has paid off. I'm alive. You're alive. Our children still have parents,
partly because we chose Asia, not Egypt, as a destination. We even have our
luggage. This time.
