AIR TRAVEL SUCKS DICK

I spent a great deal of time trying to come up with a clever and catchy title for this article. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that the subject matter deserves neither catchy nor clever. Air travel sucks. It just plain sucks.

Not even an interesting kind of suckiness. No, just the drab banality of evil and thoughtlessness.

It has become one of the circles of hell. Even if you aren’t flying, every moment spent in an airport is tense, stressful and straight up miserable. Normally I would accompany a statement like that with some sort of disclaimer. Like “well, this has been my experience”. Not this time, pal. It's a proper shitshow beginning to end. There is exactly one good thing about modern commercial air travel and it is that it is available. Which despite my protestations is still something I am in awe of and do not take for granted. A giant, hulking steel container pumped full of highly flammable substances somehow gets, and usually stays, air born. It is a not so minor miracle.

Which brings us to the second item on my list of one: safety. Commercial air travel is absurdly safe. Much, much safer than any other form of travel, including walking. Most people don’t realize it, but air travel is incredibly safe. Again a miracle, especially considering how much it sucks in every other way. I don’t even know where to start.

Let’s go with this, “security theater”. The bullshit safety performance has been proven pointless over and over. It is the “Gated community” of the airways. It does a magnificent job of inconveniencing everyone and makes everyone’s day a good bit worse, yet accomplishes nothing in terms of enhancing safety. They have failed virtually every test when it comes to stopping the bad guys. But it does a great job of stopping, dehumanizing, and humiliating the good guys.

TSA is the job of choice for people who lack even the credentials to be a mall security guard. That’s probably not fair. Or even true. But TSA employees are only slightly less victims of the system than the public. They have the lowest pay and highest turnover of anyone on the federal payroll. They serve up misery, every day of their “career”. They can’t help but catch an unhealthy dose of it themselves.

Before I go further, I must confess that I am not a completely objective observer. For two reasons, though I’ve already demonstrated I’m not good at counting reasons.

First, I'm nearly 6’3”. On most flights, I am not so neatly rolled up like a burrito. Second, I barely and miraculously escaped actual death on a small plane from Key West to Dry Tortugas. Actually, on the way back. I have NEVER been on any aircraft without my seatbelt on unless I’m going to pee. No, I have never attempted a number 2 on any airplane.

There are 2 reasons I’ve always worn my seatbelt. (Yes, yet another list). First, when I was 8 or 9 my father traveled a lot for business. He was on a flight with Dom DiMaggio, brother of Joe DiMaggio. Dom was shit-faced and laughed off the then ”stewardesses” who advised him to return to his seat during the turbulence. According to my dad, he watched DiMaggio bounce off the ceiling with his skull. He was taken off the plane on a board, his neck braced and stabilized.

This had a great effect on the young man hearing the story. Years later, I heard a similar story of a flight attendant suffering even worse injuries as she smashed into the ceiling of the aircraft.

And then in 2019, the same thing happened to me, despite the fact that I had my seatbelt securely fastened.

Enroute from Dry Tortugas to Key West, I felt a jolt as the plane lurched downward. Next, I recall smashing into the roof of the plane with my head, coming back down with almost equal force on the small jump seat I had been seated in moments before. I landed on the jumpseat with my hip.

I’m not sure who got the worst of that deal. It was either me, with a hip fracture, numerous vertebrae injuries and a less than sunny demeanor. Or the steel jump seat, that was mangled by the sheer force of my 230 pound body.

I was briefly unconscious, sitting in the aisle next to my now destroyed seat. My first thought? “Well, they tell you not to move if you have a broken neck”. But the pilot was yelling in a panic from the front of the 24 passenger plane, “Get back in your seat!!”. I glanced over at the tangled metal that had been my seat a few minutes earlier. It could no longer qualify as being a “seat”.

I spent the next extremely long 8 remaining minutes of the flight holding on for dear life, hoping there would be no further turbulence. Until I was taken off the plane by EMT’s, Dom DiMaggio style.

Ok, I understand I am not the most objective of observers, but air travel has objectively become an uncomfortable, stressful, inconvenient and often humiliating experience.

I could write a small book full of horrifying airline experiences that demonstrate fully each and every one of those adjectives. But why? If you fly you have already experienced most, if not all, of them.

But why has this happened? Why has flying degraded from being a pleasure (although a pleasure with a cigarette smoky cabin) to a living nightmare?

The root, like the root of many modern horrors, can be found in corporate takeover of the U.S. What economists call “Regulatory capture”. Simply put, it’s when the regulated companies overwhelm and control the authorities meant to regulate them.

The delightful Ronald Reagan deregulated the industry and started the process of gutting its unions.

Among other things, it led to all but the largest markets being drastically underserved as all the major players battled for the most lucrative markets and routes. Prices did drop initially as the “floor prices” dictated by congress were abolished. They slowly rose to the point where four decades later airline travel is actually more expensive now, even as service and seat size has disappeared into the void of “shareholder value”.

Speaking of shareholder value, more recently taxpayers gave the industry a 22 billion dollar gift during the pandemic. They promptly used that money for stock buy backs, executive bonuses and to find new and even more sublime ways to torture their passengers. All but the last of those were true. When you pay your taxes this year, keep in mind how your money is not going to build American roads, bridges, airports or infrastructure. No. Almost all of it ends up as some form of largesse for the mostly foreign shareholders of what were once American corporations.

In the wake of 9/11, I remember something said by comedian Bill Maher. Several months after 9/11 he was in shock of the fearfulness being shown by the American public. He gently reminded us. “We are not the scared country, we are the scary country”.

One dildo had tried to set his shoe on fire. And here we were, the mightiest country in the history of this planet. We were taking our shoes off at the airport like so many terrified sheep. 20+ years later WE STILL ARE.

Let’s face the sad truth. The terrorists won and are still winning. We are afraid and hateful of our own shadow. In this instance by “our own shadow” I mean the poor and oppressed immigrants who want only to come here and work five times as hard as we do for just a taste of the freedom that this country once offered and can again.

Thanks for reading and please check out my cure for what ails us.

Why The Fuck Not? Is available on Amazon and wherever dirty books are sold. Peace out.