It’s their companies and the system that is broken and we all suffer as a consequence.

Courtesy and politeness should be the basis of every
conversation – as Chicky said it costs nothing.
My grandmother used to say the way you behave comes back to you.
I believe this to be true. Even if someone is rude or unhelpful it doesn’t mean you can’t
be polite even in the worst situation. It’s a state of mind and a statement about the person you are, it defines the impact you leave on the people you come into contact with in your life.

I can’t count the number of upgrades I’ve received through being courteous, polite, rational.

I was checking in for a flight from BHM to DEN. All was going well until a passenger and his four kids wanted to upgrade their seats on a flight taking them eventually to Singapore. The ticket agent did his very best to accommodate the man, but he was totally irrational. They all had to be within 2 rows of each other, but 2 needed window seats and 2 needed aisle seats, and they should be as close to the front of the plane as possible, ad infinitum. The rest of us were about to explode.

Finally, the ticket agent told the man he would just have to wait for a few minutes, while the agent cleared the line a little. The man actually started spouting something about being a frequent flyer and having elite status, blah, blah. The agent said, “Well, these other people have tickets too, and some of them are probably elite status. You’re just going to have to wait.” I got to the counter with my e-ticket info (at that time, BHM didn’t have kiosks for UA) and made a point of speaking to the agent pleasantly, having my information at the ready, etc. I was processed through in record time. I have no doubt it was because I was nice to the man.

Although there are certainly notable exceptions when agents are going to be rude regardless, a passenger smiling and wishing them a good morning or afternoon makes it more difficult. As my parents always told me, good manners do not cost a dime. Insofar as it depends on me, I can do my best to be nice to these people.

Here is what happens – to explain who controls a flight:

The airline wants to fly from JFK to ORD. The airline files a instrument flight rules flight plan [all flights over 18,000 feet must be on an 'IFR' flight plan] to travel from JFK to O’Hare via a specified route. That route is specified in a book of preferred routes. When the time comes to leave, the pilot calls Clearance Delivery of Air Traffic Control for ‘clearance’ to fly. If the weather is bad in NY or enroute then the capacity of the system might be affected. In the case of NYC, the airport itself is a limiting factor. If there are 30 airplanes waiting to depart and you have 2 minutes in trail, then it takes 60 minutes to depart. If the runway area gets too busy or there are too many airplanes going to New York, then ATC issues a ground stop, which stops airplanes from taking off for JFK.

If the airliner wanted to either leave or arrive under VISUAL flight rules, then they are not bound by the ‘ground stop’. However, airlines are not generally allowed to depart under visual flight rules because of their insurance requirements. An airline ***could*** depart or arrive at one of those airports under 18,000 feet under Visual flight rules legally. Often, smaller aircraft depart larger airport that are under weather or other departure delays under visual rules and then when they are far enough away from the busy airport, they pick up the IFR clearance to get higher and become under positive control. The reason why you are delayed is because your airline needs to operate IFR in order to be insured, not because the FAA REQUIRES that the flight operate IFR. That is a significant difference.

You noted that “Also, airlines do not make the decision to fly or not fly. They are told by a federal agency whether or not they can fly…Weather is not a call the airline makes.”

That is not always the case, unfortunately. Yes, the FAA can intervene and require an airline to delay or hold certain flights. However, NOTHING prohibits an airline from looking at the number of passengers on a flight, deciding it won’t be profitable to fly, and canceling that flight based on “weather”. In fact, there’s strong incentive to do so as “weather” delays don’t usually trigger any sort of compensation requirements in the contract of carriage.

Nobody is suggesting that airlines are too timid to fly in weather that might be safe. Rather, they’re suggesting that airlines are resorting to the weather excuse when there are other reasons they don’t want to fly – usually, a 2/3-empty plane.

In my opinion, the hub-and-spoke system increases those bad calls, because a given plane, it seems like, often spends most of its time going back and forth between the hub and the same city. So if the people flying from point A to the Hub don’t make it onto flight 1, they’ll make it onto flight 2 (hopefully) a few hours later, assuming there’s room. Eventually, enough people are stacked up at the hub that it becomes reasonable to fly plane 1 back to point A.

A point-to-point system, like Southwest uses, seems more vulnerable when a flight’s cancelled (that plane is scheduled to go from point A to point B to point C to point D to point E during the course of the day, and if it doesn’t make any one of those legs, everyone downstream is affected). So Southwest has an economic incentive to fly that plane even with a light load (not that this often happens much any more), because there are a lot more “full” legs down the route.

It would be interesting to do a study to see if I’m right on the economic impact of cancelling a flight on each system.

All airline employees who don’t –wish they DID work for Southwest!!

While I can understand getting very angry at emplpyees doing the personal chat thing(I have worked with some and have been angry enough to want to hit them in the head with a boarding pass printer) Many agents will step back from the counter to decide how to handle a situation or how to work out a ticketing problem for another passenger because of what kind of ticket it is. You will also see two agents at one computer and that usually means they are trying to figure out why the software isn’t taking information/working properly and how the agents can get around a glitch to help a passenger.

At my first airline job I was in training for two weeks but we were shorted a week because Thanksgiving loads were too high and they needed help. We filled in as much as we could doing everything except getting on the computers. That ended up taking our third week of training and they ended up keeping us in the airport for hands on training from then on and just supplying the materials for the training we had missed. We were taught all the technical things but customer service was the most important thing. It was a family atmosphere and most of the employees got along and our customers loved us. It was a small hometown airline that flys the west/northwest.
It was a great place and atmosphere to work in, even though some days you were required to work long hours and had no breaks or lunch. Few people know that airline employees do not get to eat for long periods of time or at all and that could be an explanation for some of the grumpyness. Everyone was generally happy and familiarized themselves with other airlines in order to be better able to handle an irregular operation.

I made the HUGE mistake of leaving that airline for an opportunity to work at one of the top three. Mistake Mistake Mistake. Rude, not caring about passengers or their needs. Not getting luggage taken care of or tagged properly. Other new employees as well as myself were absolutely appalled at the way they worked and how absolutely rude the employees and managers/supervisors were. We were told to ‘herd’ passengers and don’t worry about how they feel because they all had a sheeps mentality anyway. I stood there with my mouth dropped open for at least twenty seconds. She said this in the middle of a pool of passengers while holding a bull horn she was using to yell at passengers with. Oh, did I mention training? I got NONE, I was an employee there for a year and never got any training. I was hurt because of their negligence and poor handling of passengers and have been out waiting for needed surgery and they are treating me like I am a leper, which come to think of it is the way they treat passengers.

You have to have a special mentally to be a good employee at an airline. Many airlines attract a good number of people with this type of mentality. How ever, many come for what they perceive as the glamour and flight benefits(which are disappearing or become something employees have to pay for and more restrictive). The pay is lousy, the medical benefits can be awful. But it’s still no excuse for staying in a job you don’t have the mental tools to do well. While many people feel like they are ‘trapped’ at the job for one reason or another.. they can find a better opportunity elsewhere.

I’ll have to exclude the people I used to work at the first airline–one young mother had a child with CP and needed the medical and flexible working hours and another had MS and needed the flexible working hours, there were several other people who had medical problems but we all had each others back and would come in at a moments notice when someone else could not make it. Man, I wish I had never left.

Ok, this rant got long but thanks for letting me get it out.