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Flying High
Opinion · July 2, 2002

The newest poster boys for airline terror have a strangely familiar face. Thomas Porter Cloyd and Christopher Scott Hughes, the America West Airlines crewmembers arrested this week for trying to fly an Airbus A319 from Miami to Phoenix while legally drunk, are two decades older and a shade lighter than the militant Islamists behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Yet, like the Al Qaeda operatives who leveled the World Trade Center, the crewmembers who were about to play fast and loose with the lives of 124 passengers did not act alone. Their instigators were the captains of the airline industry, the executives who are so intoxicated by their own power that they are oblivious to the danger they're placing their companies, and perhaps even the nation's economy in.

Their drunken flying is the real problem.

How else can you describe the airline industry's determination to stop legislative efforts to improve customer service? Instead of supporting intelligent reforms that would have compelled them to disclose the lowest ticket prices and to be upfront with passengers about delays and cancellations, the carriers dispatched their influential lobbyists to Capitol Hill with instructions to neutralize the bill. They did. As a compromise, the airlines offered an initiative called "Customers First," a vaguely-worded promise to do better that allowed them to continue operating with impunity.

Consider, also, what the carriers recently did to travel agents: they fired them. Only an industry whose leaders are flying under the influence is capable of laying off all of its loyal distributors at once. In March, United Airlines announced that it would no longer pay base commissions for tickets issued by travel agents in the United States. The other major carriers quickly followed, citing the savings they would pocket by not having to pay the incentives. What's so mystifying about the decision is that the airlines assumed these travel retailers, who were responsible for selling 75 percent of their tickets, would essentially continue working for them for free. You'd have to be high to arrive at that conclusion.

But perhaps the most arrogant act came after Sept. 11, when the entire airline industry demanded and received a generous government bailout. More than $2 billion went to the industry in compensation for the losses it suffered in the terrorist attacks, and another $10 came in the form of loan guarantees. There are few airline observers who believe that the government aid was unneeded. But there are plenty of people - passengers included - who think the airlines aren't doing enough in exchange for it. That's especially true of the federal aid, for which the carriers didn't have to do much more than continue flying long enough to cash the check.

This could very well represent the height of their excesses - the industry's belief that it could continue running inefficient, impersonal carriers that are incapable of making money. That they couldn't fail, because the government wouldn't let them.

Make no mistake, there's much more than the survival of the airline industry at stake. Hundreds of thousands of airline employees either lost their jobs or were furloughed last year and the airline industry lost more than $7 billion. If one of the major carriers collapses, it could send dangerous ripples through an already fragile economy.

All of which brings us back to the two pilots trying to fly their plane while they're loaded. No one can deny that the airline executives who are making the irrational decisions are role models for the crewmembers. Is it unreasonable to assume that they thought they could steer their actual aircraft in the same way the airline executives they look up to fly their figurative planes? Recklessly. Arrogantly. Irresponsibly.

Maybe.

In the days to come, we'll be fixated on the rare problem of pilot intoxication. But we'll miss the real story, which is that the airline chiefs have been flying while inebriated, so to speak, for a while. And that they have no plans to quit.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.