Supply Side

Kunju,

Your post made me long for Pan Am. and TWA. There was a time when America was Pan Am and Pan Am was America.

Now we have American, United, Delta. And of course, Spirit, the airline that brings your spirit down as it soars into the sky. It offers you a discount if you fly, not standby, but standing.

There’s no love lost between us and them.

Before Reaganomics, Reagan Revolution and Supply Side Economics, and David Stockman’s Trickle-Down Theory, before president Ronald Reagan de-regulated the airline industry, and before Islamic terror took grip of our psyche, and when TSA used to be just 3 syllables of the English alphabet, and not a part of our airport nightmare, air travel used to be mostly carefree, rather expensive and therefore infrequent, and you used to get a seat. A real one.

Fast forward to the future: 2017.

American, that great innovator in air travel, decided that those allergy-inducing peanuts were costing, well, more than just peanuts, and substituted them with that gourmet food called pretzels in a bag (where there was more bag than pretzels) and started charging us.

Next came the bag fees.

So folks became resourceful and instead of checking the bags, started to cram an entire week’s worth of belongings into a so-called carry-on, bulging out to the sides, on board.

It just gets better from there. To recline or not to recline. This is the question. One has to crouch, worried that one is going to elbow-bump the next seat’s already out-of-sync passenger. This is the point at which you wish you had been bumped from the flight.

So the passengers are on edge. Cabin crew is over the edge and into the deep, dealing with disgruntled passengers, irate for not being helped to stick the bulging into the overhead. ‘The Crouching Travelers become Hidden Dragons’.

And now the pilots, not to feel left out and outwitted, have joined in the action.

Airlines meanwhile are looking for additional ways to squeeze out the max for the mini (profit and comfort respectively).

So they hire Harvard MBA’s (sorry, Sushila, not you!) who do extensive and years-long research, and come up with ingenious ideas such as if you shave off a foot width from each seat, you can add 40 more passengers per row.

And as if this isn’t enough, they have us go through the upper crust cabin, where the ruling class is sitting with fluffed pillows at the back, margaritas in hand, and Ralph Lauren cotton slippers on feet, throwing pitiful glances at the Proletariat, dragging their sorry suitcases down the crammed isles.

Has anybody noticed how all this brouhaha from throwing punches never happens in first class?

A recent Washington post headline read, I kid you not, ‘Much-loved giant rabbit found dead after United flight to O’Hare’. The poor rodent (of the phylum Chordata) was most likely petrified of his Homo Sapiens fellow travelers and may have died of acute shock.

This scenario is not going to bring out the best in mankind any time soon, that’s for sure.

So I suggest we should just take to the air on ‘a wing and a prayer’. And may be JetBlue.

Happy Saturday all, from rainy New England