Equal Time

I’m not sure why being a fair-minded man is so important to me. It’s possible that it’s just how I was raised – our family is known for a very direct honesty, to the extent that some of my cousins don’t understand me when I try to tell them that this behavior is unusual. But whatever the reason, I do try to see both sides of a discussion, and to provide both sides of the case when I present news stories for your consideration in this space. So in the interest of even-handed discussions, I should probably acknowledge that just because I spend so much time in this blog making fun of the airlines, that does not mean that transporting huge numbers of people great distances in complex machines according to an arbitrary schedule and set of rules is easy. On the contrary: as recent events have shown, even something as small as a mishandled diaper can bring a flight to a sudden halt…

According to a story on the UPI “Odd News” page this week, a United Airlines flight from Phoenix to Cleveland was delayed and ultimately cancelled because one of the passengers tried to flush a diaper down one of the onboard toilets, causing the plane’s waste disposal system to back up and shutting down most of the rest of the lavatories. The story does not specify the type of aircraft or the total number of passengers affected by the cancellation, but if there were over 71 people on board it wasn’t a CRJ or ERJ type; you would need something at least the size of a 737 or A320 to get that much payload. What that tells us is that this wasn’t just a case of some small puddle-jumper not being up to the challenge; this was a major episode aboard a 200-ton airplane – caused by something weighing less than a pound when empty…

Now, the point of my bringing this up is that I really don’t feel we can blame the airline. Every lavatory on every United aircraft is equipped with signs in multiple languages, as well as International pictograms, telling the user not to put foreign objects down the toilet, and anyone with the intelligence of a newborn hamster should be able to figure out that doing so is a bad idea. By the same token, United’s maintenance and repair people could be the very best in their field, and follow all FAA, NTSB and manufacturer’s specific requirements for maintaining their aircraft, and there still wouldn’t be anything they could do about sabotage – which this is, albeit unintentional sabotage. At least, I certainly hope it was unintentional…

The American Author Tom Clancy once pointed out that the minimum number of mines your need to build a minefield and keep anyone from moving through a specified area is zero – you just need to issue a press release claiming those waters or lands have been mined, and then watch your adversary try to prove a negative in a life-or-death situation. Recently, the same point has been made about using disinformation to shut down airports in the U.S. – you don’t even need actual bombs; just leave a suspicious package in the baggage claim area and the whole airport will be shut down for days. Do this in enough cities and you could completely disrupt commerce in an economy that is already on the shaky side; economic warfare at its most basic level. And now we find out that you could completely cripple the U.S. airline industry, and possibly that of every other nation in the world, using nothing but a battalion of colicky babies and really stupid parents…

I’m not saying the airlines don’t deserve public mockery and scorn for some of the outrageously stupid and incompetent things we’ve seen them do over the past few years, or for the political idiocy that led directly to making the terrorist outrages of September 11 possible. I’m just pointing out that given how inherently difficult it is to run an airline in the first place, it would really behoove them to get the little things right. Because it approaches a mathematical certainty that somewhere, sometime, some other passenger is going to try flushing something unfortunate at the wrong moment – or something equally stupid…