Unfriendly Skies

A friend of the family mentioned the other day that she had to wait for most of the day at the airport in Chicago for a pilot to arrive from another city and take command of their flight. Yes, you read that correctly: not an airplane, a pilot. The aircraft that they would be boarding was sitting at the gate, waiting, but the guy who would be flying it was coming in from somewhere else, and was apparently delayed by weather, missed connections, flight delays, and all of the same things that delay air travelers of any other kind…

The obvious question is why the airline didn’t find someone else who was qualified to fly this assignment somewhere in Chicago, have him take the flight, and then assign the delayed pilot to whatever flight the replacement was originally supposed to fly? No explanation was offered, but it is possible that they didn’t have a spare pilot available at the time, or that the delayed pilot lives in Los Angeles and was going home to his family at the end of the day, or that any of the 10,000 obscure FAA regulations would have prevented a simple solution like this one from working. A much bigger question, at least from the manager’s perspective, is why you would arrange things this way in the first place…

I don’t mean to suggest that scheduling flights, aircraft and personnel for a huge national airline (and this was one, but I’m going to withhold saying which one) isn't an enormous undertaking and you don't have to expect the occasional glitch. In this case, however, you have grossly inconvenienced everybody who was supposed to be on that delayed flight, as well as everyone who was waiting for them in L.A., everyone who was waiting to use the airplane for its NEXT flight, and so on. Even worse, you have done so for a reason that most business people will dismiss as scheduling incompetence, and non-managers will dismiss as being caused because your company is too cheap to have backup personnel standing by where you need them…

Now we all know that having a highly-paid professional sitting around each of the hundreds of airports to which your company flies on the off-chance that one might be needed to cover a specific flight is not a good use of company funds. The same people who are unhappy with you for delaying a flight while the pilot arrives will be much more unhappy if you have to start raising fares to cover the salaries of the hundreds of pilots assigned to hang around airports waiting until they are needed (although the creation of hundreds of high-paying jobs might be politically useful during an election year). The problem is that the customers who are forced to wait for hours on end will not see it that way, and they are all too likely to start looking for another carrier…

The fact which does not appear to have reached the upper echelons of management in the airline business is that these services are now a commodity business. With the airlines cutting all possible expenses, eliminating all amenities and special features, and cooking up new fees to apply wherever possible, the days of brand loyalty to a specific airline are almost over; the only thing that ties a customer to a specific airline now are frequent flier miles, and even those programs are not the draw they once were (with credit card companies cashing in on that market segment). Consequently, it no longer makes sense to ask passengers to sit around for hours or days on end waiting until circumstances are convenient (or profitable) to the airline…

The fact is, the airlines can do better than this. It’s possible to cancel a flight and put your passengers on earlier ones; it’s possible to handle unavailable personnel the way you handle malfunctioning equipment (bring in replacements); it’s possible to schedule operations that put the needs of your customers ahead of the needs of your employees (even really elite employees like flight crew). And the performance of some of the “upstart” airlines like Southwest and especially Virgin America certainly suggest that things don’t have to be this way. Maybe the next time the airline industry asks Congress to bail them out, we should just tell them to get better at their jobs – or perish…