People who grew up after the airlines were deregulated in 1978 have a hard time believing there was a time when most people booked a scheduled flight their primary concern was that it might crash.
Geezers who flew before 1978 recall that the least of our fears were the now common terrors of being served famine-inducing snacks, being abruptly canceled, getting stuck on the tarmac for hours, arriving at destinations late, getting conked on the head by all the junk stuffed into overhead bins or finding themselves shoe-horned into seating configurations that come close to testing the Geneva Convention's standards for the humane transport of prisoners of war.
It is just as hard to imagine that an industry could go through a revolution in which air travel became a new form of mass transit without any serious deterioration in its safety record. The boom in air travel has been accompanied by pilot shortages, severe strains on the air-traffic-control system and crowded runways and air space that are inherently more accident-prone. The commercial carriers, stripped of their protected status, have become subject to the laws of cost control that in a normal industry exert subtle but telling pressure on safety margins.
The amazing result? Air travel has become even safer but airlines have become one of the nation's more loathed institutions. Complaints against major airlines are 75 percent higher than in 1999.
And just at a time when it is seeking federal approval to swallow up a competitor, United Airlines, the world's largest, is suffering worst. A meltdown in its labor relations has forced it to cancel 4,800 flights since May and to announce an advanced cutback that will wipe 1,840 flights off its September schedule.
If UAL had announced that in order to save further leg room, some coach passengers would be required to fly standing up strapped to a pole, it could hardly have had a more cruel effect on the airline's public image.
And just to test our credulity beyond endurance, UAL Inc. is the world's largest employee-owned corporation. Its largest shareholders are the pilots whose refusal to work overtime without a contract have turned its flight schedules into a shambles. And if the merger of UAL and US Airways is approved, we can only imagine the creation of a carrier with even greater power to dominate the industry and to impose standards that — if the last two months are a wretched example — would end dependable air travel as we know it.
To UAL's managers, the bright idea to buy US Airways must be looking more and more like the merger from hell. Not only has it stirred anti-trust fears, but it is central to UAL's scheduling problems. This has to do with pilot fears of who'll get bumped on seniority lists when the cockpit crews of the two airlines are combined. These are things good corporate titans sort out before they propose such an audacious and controversial merger. If so many of UAL's woes didn't seem self-inflicted — or inflicted by its very owners — it would be easier to agree with UAL President Rono Dutta's characterization of the company's situation as "tragic."
This whole mess could give a huge black eye to the sensible concept of employee ownership. For air carriers, it could also call into question the whole concept of deregulation and provoke Congress into enacting a passenger's bill of rights. Still, I think Dutta should relax and try not to panic. The fact that so many of United's passengers are furious and the competitive pressures this will bring to make it into a nicer airline all but assure that the problems will be dealt with.
Nobody said deregulation would be a picnic, but an airline that is not protected against competition has an amazing flexibility and incentive to improve its performance.
Don't even be surprised if you get an edible meal on your next coach flight.
Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service