Another day, and yet another mid-air near miss from Qantas. Yesterday, a routine and normally mundane flight from Adelaide to Melbourne suddenly lost cabin pressure and was immediately taken by its pilot down 16,000 feet in altitude, scaring the bejesus out of the passengers on board and doubtless a few high-flying bird life.
Being a regular on that Melbourne-Adelaide route I am not at all surprised that they have had another incident, albeit one that is different in nature to the landing gear failure that happened in 2008. Domestic air travel has been gradually becoming more and more crowded and uncomfortable during the past 20 years, but on that leg, Qantas regularly outdo even their own ghastly standards. I don't know whether it is because Sydney-based Qantas deliberately favours Rugby Union states over AFL states, but every time I get on that battered 737 to and from Adelaide, it is a nightmare. The legroom is almost non-existent, there is never a spare seat anywhere on the plane and the pint-sized overhead luggage bins barely fit a laptop case, let alone the plethora of bric-a-brac that most passengers insist on carrying on board. Not that you can blame them, mind, because the other day at Melbourne I spent 45 minutes after I arrived waiting for the baggage handlers to unload my luggage - hardly an acceptable situation for anyone with important commitments to get to. Frankly with the sheer volume of people and junk on the plane I am amazed that something that old and decrepit can take off at all, let alone somehow fly 750 kilometres without incident.Which of course yesterday it didn't.
This latest misadventure led me to ponder the compromises to quality of service that all airlines have made over the past 20 years with a view to achieving ever-lower airfares. If, as the latest spate of incidents suggests, they are now starting to compromise safety standards, then it is high time for them to stop their ridiculous predatory pricing and halt the decline in standards by putting fares back up.
Anyone who has used air travel for any length of time would realise that the real cost of air travel (namely, the cost of air travel relative to inflation) has been dropping continually since the domestic industry returned to normal after the 1989 pílot strike. In some cases, the actual dollar cost is less as well. By way of example, I remember flying return to Melbourne from Brisbane on Compass in late 1991 at a cost of roughly $240. Nowadays, if I booked early enough and weren't too fussy about the time of travel, I could undertake the same trip for about $210 - which is incredible when you think about how the price of most other goods and services has risen over the same period.
This is of course not a bad thing, as it has enabled thousands of people who could previously not afford air travel to have the benefit of flying instead of clogging up the highways of Australia with their caravans. However as with any good or service, where you cut prices to the bone to try and build volume and/or market share, something has to give. And to anyone who has flown recently, they will know only too well that what airlines have sacrificed is the quality of their service.
To illustrate how far standards have dropped, take a look at this TAA commercial from the 1980s (to anyone under 30 reading this, TAA was the precursor domestic airline to Australian Airlines, which was subsequently bought by Qantas in 1992):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysg4CZX8R9Y&playnext=1&list=PL2A0CC4BF8444E468&index=17
Amazing, isn't it? I know it's a commercial, but look at the legroom. Look at the restaurant quality food that the cook is preparing. Look at the attractive and attentive hostesses pouring more alcohol into their dreamily contented passengers. It actually makes you WANT to get on a plane just for the pleasurable experience of flying. Except for the privileged few up at the pointy end of the plane, its hard to imagine this sort of service nowadays. Instead you're lucky if you get flung a rock hard cookie by a Medusa-like child-hating hostess and land within 90 minutes of your scheduled arrival time.
What baffles me is why airlines the world over have done this. Running an airline is an incredibly risky business, so why do airlines cut their margins to the bone and chase volume so aggressively as opposed to insisting on ticket pricing which properly reflects these risks? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there is always a lot of new competition entering the market. For some reason, any billionaire with more ego than sense seems to want to own an airline, so the established operators tend to react to new upstarts by starting a pricing war which puts them out of business. Protecting your market share is of course sound business practice, however not to the point where your customers either dread getting on one of your planes or worse, are too frightened to do so,
Which is why I think the balance has to come back the other way. Often I find myself comparing notes with friends and colleagues about overseas holidays and the thing that invariably dominates the conversation is how crapulent the flight was. When this sort of thing happens, it is clear that standards have hit rock bottom and things are at a point where people will be prepared to pay more in order to enjoy a standard of travel that doesn't leave them physically and mentally scarred. If, in the interests of saving money, other passengers are prepared to impersonate a concertina for 12 hours and eat food that any self-respecting Somalian would turn their nose up at, then fine, let them do it. But at the same time, the airlines should cater for those who are prepared to pay a bit more for a modicum of comfort. Who knows, maybe the extra dollars might enable them to pay the long-suffering maintenance workers a bit more and help cut out the frustrating delays that seem to be part and parcel of air travel today.
For all their flaws, Qantas have started to lead the way with the introduction of a "Premium Economy" class on international flights. It would be a good start for them to roll this out domestically as well. They would probably find that business travellers unable or unwilling to justify travelling in business class might see this as an effective compromise. The extra room might also enable them to get some work done in-flight, which under current conditions is nigh on impossible unless you own a laptop the size of a postage stamp and worked for 5 years in a circus as a contortionist.
Until then, my fellow passengers, you will just have to grin and bear it. When, however, you find yourself delayed for 3 hours or sitting next to a morbidly obese individual whose butt is occupying 35% of your seat, at least you can draw some small level of comfort from the fact that you aren't travelling on an American domestic airline. For that, my friends, is an experience truly not worth writing about. Unless of course your name happens to be Stephen King.
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