Why I hate Flying

In less than 24 hours I am going to be engaging in one of my least favorite activities. Putting my body into a hollow tube and letting people I barely know navigate it at hundreds of miles per hour through the air.

Now, I joke, I’m not actually one of those white-knuckle fliers that have seen William Shatner’s episode of The Twilight Zone too many times, but I do genuinely hate flying.

It is one of the great paradoxes of my life. I love traveling, I hate flying. If I could teleport myself and my luggage where I needed to go, I would be a world traveler in no time, no matter what the expense.

But as it is, I am stuck with flying and the headaches that comes with it. Though I know no one is particularly fond of air travel, I seem to have an especially strong aversion to it.

Why do I hate flying? Well, the reason starts even before you get to the airport.

Buying Tickets

Making any large purchase is a major pain that no one enjoys. If you aren’t made of money and can afford to simply throw away hundreds of dollars, you have to spend hours of time trying to get the best price that you can.

Unfortunately though, with buying tickets you are hopelessly screwed in that regard. When buying a ticket you usually have two questions “What is the cheapest flight?” and “When does it leave?” But with dozens of sites offering different rates and some companies offering exclusive deals it becomes obvious that you are going to have to search about a dozen different locations to find the best price.

But then comes the biggest problem. Once you’ve found the best price you have to wonder if it will always be the best. Unlike buying cars, video game consoles or cell phones, with ticket purchases you get to play the stock market as you try to buy low and… well, just buy low.

The fact that sites such as Farecast have a right to exist is a huge black eye on the entire airline industry. If it were simply a matter of “buy early because prices go up the closer you go in” it would be acceptable and easy. But no, rates rise and fall faster than a stockbroker’s pulse and you could easily wind up paying more than twice the amount of the guy sitting next to you even though you did the responsible thing and booked months ahead of time.

Once you’ve got your ticket, or are lucky enough to have someone else buy it for you, the rest of the journey isn’t much better.

At the Airport

Modern airports are the antithesis to the train stations old. Rather than being models of efficiency, they are shopping malls that planes land at from time to time.

The Newcastle, UK airport was the worst I’ve seen at this, converting the entire waiting area into an overpriced food court and forcing passengers to walk through a perfume store to get to their gates (a pity this was my last memory of an absolutely incredible city), but U.S. ones aren’t much better.

Sure, everyone needs to eat and drink when they are in an airport, but there is a fine line between offering needed amenities and turning it into a profit center. Atlanta actually has a pretty good balance, but it has other problems as an airport, namely the fact the whole place looks depressing, takes forever to walk around and my plane is always at the last gate at the end of a three-mile corridor.

The biggest problem most airports have is that there is no rhyme or reason to the layout. Even experienced travelers find themselves wondering aimlessly around airports trying to find a gate or a connection.

Airports pride themselves on being efficient people-movers but, in truth, break down to shopping malls with lost customers and too much luggage.

They’re great for exercise and wasting money, but not much else.

Security

photo credit: nedrichards

I won’t spend too many words on security since everyone already knows how asinine the bulk of the process already is. Between removing your shoes, taking off your belt, pulling out your laptop and removing all liquids, you are in danger of becoming a shoeless, pant-less, theft victim who no one wants to help because he smells bad.

Still, the group I feel the worst for are the actual agents that do the security. The have, hands down, the most thankless, mundane, monotonous, low-playing, bureaucratic and unrespected jobs in the country. Janitors have job variety, factory workers have respect and dentists get paid good. Most sane people would rather work just about anywhere else.

I can’t bring myself to be angry with them when they’re short or impatient with me because I’m not familiar with rule 36a subsection 2. In 30 minutes I’ll be on a plane somewhere else and they’ll be lucky if it is lunchtime. My hat is off to them for not losing their minds and being able to at least fake a smile from time to time.

The problem I have with security is a much higher up one. They haven’t created security, but security theater. It is designed to make people feel safe even though there is very little anyone can do to actually make you prevent danger, at least to the extent most people want.

But what is really stupid about security isn’t that you have to go through it, but that you have to go through it at almost every airport. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to go through security for a second or third time on a trip just because the hub airport was too stupid to design itself so that gate-to-gate passengers don’t have to pass through a checkpoint.

Real smooth Phoenix.

On the Plane

Finally, after everything, you’re on the plane itself and at the center of the maze of agony.

I don’t know whether it is my imagination, the fast food or a conspiracy by the airlines, but every time I get onto a plane it feels more cramped than the last. No empty spots on the plane, seats barely big enough to hold my skinny self and and aisles so narrow that they could make a fire marshal choke to death with hatred.

Airplanes are everything you hated about long car rides with your family multiplied by about 20. The space is even more crowded, the people are more annoying and the entertainment makes your parents love for the oldies station seem like good times.

But then there are all of those additional charges. These days you pay for pillows, headphones and sodas. Going back to the ticket issue, how do you know which ticket is cheapest if you don’t know what you’re doing to be charged on the plane itself and how much you’re going to use? It makes figuring out your cell phone bill seem like a joy.

Fortunately one charge has never applied to me, the checked bag one. I never pack more than I can fit in a carry on bag. It’s a rule of mine. But even that strategy has come to bite me in the ass a few times as some airplanes, despite those cool boxes to check and make sure your bag will fit, don’t have room for actual carry on luggage.

Airlines have invented something called “gate checks” where you leave your bag on the ramp and it gets shoved underneath the plane, with all of the other luggage, and then you supposedly pick it up there when you’re done.

The problem is that it never works that way. Half the time the idiots unloading the luggage just put it on the conveyor belt like everything else, forcing you through the exact headache you were hoping to avoid, and the other half of the time you stand around in the corridor, blocking foot traffic, waiting for them to put your bag up. The whole time you’re standing there, clutching your ticket like a jilted prom date hoping the nightmare will end and that you still have all of your stuff.

Great.

This has lead to a completely different rule. If I’m gone less than 3 days, I pack everything in a backpack. A single backpack. More than that, I add a carry on. If Crystal and I could go to England for a week with just one carry on bag, two backpacks and a handbag, I think I can get by.

Not that I like having to get by with so little, its just that I’d be getting by with a lot less if the airlines lost my luggage or made me leave some of it at home because I couldn’t afford it.

Conclusions

Flying is so bad that, even after you get to your destination, it is always in the back of your mind that you have to do it all again in a few days. No matter how used to traveling you are, that always puts a bit of a damper on any trip.

Granted, we Americans don’t have it as bad as some countries, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam was the worst I’ve seen in terms of layout and security, but flying is still far more of a pain than it should have to be.

For some of the problems I blame ourselves. Our obsessive quest to find cheaper tickets drove down prices and discouraged the creation a market based on quality and price. But much of it belongs to the airlines and the government.

The result is that flying is now a game. It’s one where you try to from A to B as cheaply as possible while the airlines, airports everyone in between tries to siphon off as much money.

While you expect this game when you go to buy a car or a house, here you’ve supposedly already paid for the trip before you showed up. This experience, supposedly, is what you paid for.

If only it were so easy.