Big Old Jet Airliner...From Hell
Nick Gillespie | April 2, 2007, 6:48am
Last year saw more bags lost or stolen, a decline in on-time performance, and a record number of people being bumped from flights. From an account of a new study about flying the friendly skies:
Last year, 6.50 bags were lost, stolen or damaged for every 1,000 passengers, compared with 6.06 in 2005....
On-time performance worsened last year, the report said, with 75.5 percent of flights arriving on time, compared with 77.3 percent in 2005....
The study found an increase in the number of passengers who were bumped or denied boarding because of oversold flights - 1.01 denied boardings per 10,000 passengers last year, compared with 0.89 per 10,000 in 2005.
Curiouser and curiouser: "Overall, complaints about the airlines last year held steady at about 0.88 complaints for every 100,000 passengers."
The study comes out of Nebraska University and Wichita State and is based on the Airline Quality Report, an annual report issued since 1991 that uses Department of Transportation stats. More here.
What is to be done? Finish the job of deregulation started in the late '70s (thank you, Alfred Kahn!) and reduce useless red tape and government bureaucracy in air traffic control, foreign-ownership rules, and more. Just ask Robert W. Poole, founder of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason Online and the print mag, and an expert in all things aviation.
Rex Rhino | April 2, 2007, 11:42am | #
I wonder which regulation is causing more bags to be lost?
I will tell you how government regulations cause bags to be lost - as I lost a bag to government regulation!
See, I was flying from Yerevan to Detroit, with a stopover in Paris. Now, normally, if you have a stopover in Paris, your bags would be loaded off one plane and on to the other (they have already passed security in Yerevan). However, they have people in the U.S. terminal in Paris who ask you if you have been to a "muslim country" (yes, they blatently and openly ask you if you have been to a "muslim country", I am not joking) between the time that you left the U.S. and are returning. If the answer is "yes" (and it was "yes" for me, I had been to couple "muslim countries"), U.S. regulations require the bag to be removed from the plane, go through another security check in Paris, and then put back on the departing plane. Since the stopover was only 45 minutes, and it takes about 30 minutes to disembark and get to the gate where you are leaving again, there was no way they were going to take the bag off, take it to the special U.S. security screening (the U.S. has it's own special isolated terminal, with its own security at De Gaul, supervised by the TSA, so don't try to blame the French for the clusterfuck!).
Of course, since the bag is not traveling with you on your plane, that requires another security check and scrutiny. Needless to say, my bag stayed in Paris for weeks before they actually figured out how to get it for me.
Had this flight been going to Canada (where I live, so I am very familiar with how it works there), or probably any other country but the U.S., no-one would be asking people if they been to a "muslim country" and required extra scrutiny for those bags (which had already passed security, and flew on one flight perfectly fine).
So here joe, is a clear and undeniable case of U.S. government regulation directly causing a situation where lost bags are inevitble. Are you going to stand corrected that U.S. regulations damn well cause lost bags, or are you going to think of some convoluted reason why it wasn't the U.S. governments fault?
