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Flying the Unfriendly Skies
Destinations · September 22, 2003

Remember when air travel was an elegant experience that passengers dressed up for? When meals were served on china with real silverware? And doting flight attendants pinned honorary plastic wings on the lapels of wide-eyed youngsters?

I do, because I was one of those kids. I was charmed by crew members who made me feel like I was sitting in first class, even though I had a seat in economy. And, of course, I wanted to grow up to be a pilot. Every boy who was lucky enough to fly in those days wanted to be a pilot, especially after a visit to the cockpit.

Those days are over. Just last week I traveled from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Dallas with my 9-month-old son. Flight attendants hardly noticed the baby on board. When I asked one to point me to a restroom with a changing station, she rolled her eyes. "I wouldn't know," she sniffed. "I don't do babies."

Infants aren't the only thing the airlines don't do these days. The plates and silverware are gone. Come to think of it, most flights don't even serve meals anymore. Travelers just order takeout before takeoff, filling the recycled cabin air with the olfactory delights of french fries, kung pao chicken and pulled-pork barbecue sandwiches.

Let's face it: Airlines have become little more than winged Greyhound buses, shuttling their human cargo from one airport to another. And forget cockpit visits. Pilots stay behind reinforced cockpit doors, thanks to terrorism fears.

Who is to blame? In many respects, we are. We demanded a democratization of the air-travel experience. We decided that tickets needed to be cheap enough for the masses. Sure thing, responded the airlines, cutting fares by 40% over three decades. Then they made it easy for us to compare bargain fares online. Then they made it even cheaper by boosting frequent-flier benefits. Some services declined, but we didn't seem to mind, because suddenly anybody could afford to fly.

Too bad the airlines didn't know when to say when. Fares were so low, they stopped making money, resulting in bankruptcies. Solution? More cuts -- but not the kind we necessarily wanted. Want to check an extra bag? Forty bucks, please. Book a last-minute flight using your frequent-flier points? Fifty dollars. Make a change to a ticket? That'll be a Ben Franklin. Southwest Airlines even forced overweight passengers to purchase two seats.

We can blame the airlines for running their businesses into the ground, and the government for letting them. But we can point the finger at ourselves, too, for demanding lower fares without considering the cost of a bargain. Our penny-pinching ways slowly dismantled the travel industry's proudest example of customer service.

But that doesn't mean we should jettison our sense of civility, even if we have to create our own "airline experience." My son may not want to grow up to be a pilot. But when he's old enough, I'll get him a pair of Pan Am junior pilot wings, pack a sandwich in his National Airlines lunchbox and tell him a story about what it used to be like to soar above the clouds with class.

Christopher Elliott and Kari Haugeto are travel writers based in Key Largo, Fla. For additional photos and more destinations, check out their site at Not2far.com. This article originally appeared in USA Weekend magazine.