The media's recent airline industry focus recounts what are now all-
too-familiar stories of congestion, rolling delays, air rage and strained
customer relations. Perhaps most disturbing, from the standpoint of
solving any of these problems, the media also report the industry's
penchant for laying blame elsewhere. While environmental and external
influences undoubtedly contribute to a lag in air traffic control
capacity growth, the airline industry has itself to blame for the majority of
today's "system" delays and resulting passenger anxiety and backlash.
Boiled down to basics, the media focus offers vignettes on the
extent to which post-deregulation airline industry profit optimization has
consistently hammered customer comfort, business consumers' wallets and
employee motivation, in the hopes of engorging option holders' (e.g.
executives') paper wealth.
To be sure, airline deregulation and the optimization it enabled
has offered leisure customers bargains and business customers network
growth, to and from hubs. The high price of this change, however, has been an
increase in customer and employee anxiety from higher load factors,
compounded by reduced aircraft size and related service demands, the
commoditization of coach service and substantial real-dollar air fare
increases for business consumers.
Add to this continuing job insecurity among many front-line
employees, due to more than a decade of outsourcing, downsizing and,
more recently, domestic and international code-sharing and alliance-related concerns. Not that CAAis faultless. Sure, it's embarrassing in 2009 to see
vacuum tube failures strangle the ATC system. Greater airports would be
nice to have, as well. But let's face it, the congestion problem is
largely of the industry's own making, the result of a consistent
strategic push outside the capacity envelope.