Whatever Happened To “Fly The Friendly Skies”?

I’ve been travelling internationally for more than 50 years, many of them from Australia to and from other countries. The flying experience has undoubtedly changed over those decades, and not for the better. When I refer to the flying experience, it’s not just being in the air but arriving at and from the airport, going through security, and boarding.

In the 60s and 70s, people dressed up when travelling on planes. Men wore jackets and ties, and women wore dresses or slacks. Today, sloppy dress is the norm; even flight attendants may succumb to sloppiness.

If you didn’t notice, post-COVID prices have increased by more than 50% as airlines have been trying to recoup their losses. This is even though in the U.S. government funding topped $74 billion, while in Australia, it exceeded $5 billion. Who actually paid for it? We did, through our taxes. So now, after four years, we keep funding the airlines with exorbitant fare prices and no signs of abating. Of course, we have a choice not to travel. People, including ourselves, rationalize that we didn’t travel for three years, so we would have spent that money anyway. It looks like high fares are here to stay.

Are we getting better service at high prices? Absolutely not. In several countries, airlines charge for booking the seat of your choice or checked luggage. As for food on a plane? You must buy so-called food, or the food served in the economy sometimes needs to be more suitable for human consumption.

A flight attendant, Rich Henderson, stated in an interview concerning the pandemic, “I always tell people that when Covid happened, all of the fun parts of being a flight attendant, all of the satisfying, exciting parts of being a flight attendant were stripped from the job.”

While flight attendants may be experiencing more stress today from some unruly passengers, some don’t help their cause.

It’s one thing to see 

dishevelled passengers, but flight attendants? On a recent United Airlines flight in the U.S., we had a flight attendant whose attire was shockingly substandard. For some airlines, the deportment of some of their staff has deteriorated. On the same flight, the head flight attendant appeared wearing a Palestinian scarf while in the boarding area. While everyone is free to politically align themselves with whoever they want, airline staff should not inject political messaging while serving an airline company.

In Australia, several flight attendants were on board a Qantas aircraft wearing Palestinian flag badges in full view of passengers. I don’t want airline staff wearing Palestinian, Israeli, Ukrainian or Russian badges. Keep your politics out of the job environment.

Remember the days before the security screening of today? Sometimes, you have to endure the indignity of full body @searches. While going through an airport in Palm Springs, California, I can remember an older man in his 80s in a wheelchair was forced to be searched because he couldn’t go through the scanner, and a wand pinged around his hip. His wife, who was with him, had brought x-rays of an artificial hip. It was useless because the security man was insistent on searching for him.

Recently, a family member was on a Qantas flight from Vancouver to Sydney. Suddenly, just past Hawaii, the flight deck announced that they were diverting to Hawaii because of an issue with one of the engine generators. We later discovered that the Dreamliner only flew on one engine, and air traffic control wanted them to proceed to Brisbane. The pilots said no way.

The passengers had to disembark in Honolulu, were given food vouchers, which no one accepted and then were put up at a hotel for the night. The next day, they were told to come to the airport and that a plane was being organized. The pilots said the aircraft wasn’t acceptable, and the people were being shuffled back to spend another night in the hotel. On the third trip to the airport, they finally had a fully functioning plane that could take them to Australia.

We know that Boeing is having issues with their aircraft, but we also know that there have been issues with pilots in the post-Covid vaccine era. We have spoken before of several pilots who have suffered cardiac arrests either while in the cockpit or shortly after landing.

Oh, I long for those days when you could jokingly chat with the air hostesses, and they would take you into the cockpit to meet the pilots. It was a different world then. At least today, we have technology that is making a difference in preventing airline crashes––we hope.