Photo by Teh Eng Koon via Getty ImagesMy friend and I were thinking about how we could kill the night before our Halloween Roteeye when the email popped up on his phone. “Oh shit,” he said. “Our flight has just been canceled.” I called the American Airlines customer service line as we were walking down Scottsdale, Arizona’s stunning beige Main Street, and was immediately put on a callback list with “over four hours” waiting. In fairness to American Airlines, it did: I got the call four hours and nineteen minutes later, just as we were reaching the front of the American Airlines physical customer service line at Phoenix Airport. A robotic voice thanked me for my patience and then promptly put me back on hold. I hung up. From October 29 to November 1, American Airlines canceled more than 2,300 flights across the country, including mine, due to bad weather at its Dallas hub and, most importantly, serious staffing problems. That same weekend, Southwest Airlines canceled around 1,800 flights for the same reasons. These mass cancellations are touted as harbingers of crappy vacation trips, which is probably true. But they are also blatant examples of what happens when industry giants with virtually zero competition – like the US and the Southwest – kidnap consumers and workers with impunity. A typical trip to the airport involves shoelessness, $ 16 worth of cocktails, and the humiliating power game of deciding when to get up and line up to board the plane. The cancellation or delay of a flight adds the secret sauce of personal crisis to an already uncomfortable experience. And a massive flight delay means that you are not just in a personal crisis – you are surrounded by people in personal crisis and you are preparing to pass on their fear to the workers who have become powerless by the scale of the problem. From a technical point of view, delays and failures create a “bad vibe” in the terminal. Why is this bad mood allowed to run rampant in our nation’s airports? Because four giant corporations (United, American, Southwest, and Delta) control the vast majority of air traffic. You’re able to top up at will, increase ticket prices, shut down service to smaller airports, and generally get your asses off without worrying about people flying off elsewhere. In fact, they make more money when we are down. According to Vox, “airlines charged $ 8.6 billion in baggage and change fees in 2019, six times the $ 1.4 billion they raised in 2007.” One of the most painful aspects of the canceled flight experience is that at first you still have the illusion of control. When we first got in line, gossip snaked its way through the line as people exchanged little bits of information about what was going on. At three hour most people were sitting on the floor or on their suitcases, silent and emptied. As we approached, I asked my friend if I should tell the person behind the American Airlines counter that we need to get on a flight as soon as possible because “my sister is about to give birth.” (I don’t have a sister.) Morale was miserable. When we actually got to the counter (again at exactly the same time I got my automatic call back) we were ready to take whatever Americans had on hand just to get out of the airport and away from the airport looping soundtrack of Phoenix government officials take turns greeting us in sunny Arizona and wishing us a safe journey. What American Airlines was willing to give us were vouchers for a night in a hotel, a cab ride to and from the airport, and two $ 12 meal vouchers – be careful! We discovered the real value of these notes as soon as we left the airport. Our taxi driver, who told us on our crossing that he has been driving in Phoenix for 18 years, pretended not to know what an airline voucher is. Our hotel’s restaurants were closed at the time of check-in, so we couldn’t get a midnight meal with our meal vouchers. And our hotel voucher was good for the night, but after checking out we had to go back to the airport at noon to refuel for the second night. On our second day at the airport, the lines were shorter – although we waited long enough to attend a full work meeting on Google Hangouts. Experiencing an airport line in front of my colleagues was slightly better than experiencing the airport line raw. For our problems, we were booked at a different hotel in a different city, which meant we had to go back to Hotel One, collect our luggage and take it to Hotel 2 while trying to save as little money as possible. The whole ordeal lasted another three hours. Almost everyone we spoke to during two days late, whether American Airlines employees or others, were professional and relatively personable. They were also visibly stressed by the influx of displaced people, tired people waving slips of paper or QR codes. This stress, which has built up over time, is why American Airlines ended up in this situation in the first place. Overworked airline workers on COVID vacation left planes understaffed last weekend, turning a regional weather event (high winds in Texas) into a national raid. And why would someone from the PTO return to a job putting them at the forefront of in-flight COVID security enforcement or putting the burden of managing and maintaining complex schedules right on their plate while flying a damn plane? It wasn’t all bad for me. I got to have a picture of myself sitting by the pool on my Instagram story (Leiden isn’t my personal brand) and see Godzilla vs. Kong on a small screen next to a guy in a Supreme shirt. I returned to my Brooklyn apartment two days later than planned and two days of work, my Tuesday consumed by two flights that (thank goodness) went as planned. A week later, I’m mostly busy with work and generally recovering from the nightmarish experience of staying in a room that has access to Showtime but not through HGTV. In short, my experience with flight cancellation has been the textbook definition of a first world problem – and that is the whole point. The health and happiness of consumers and workers seem irrelevant in a capitalist economy whose industries are largely dominated by a few large corporations that make the most money when they stifle competition on either side of the equation.
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