Flying thoughts

After the better part of a week of travel, I noticed a couple of things relating to airports.

I was stuck in Denver between flights when CNN had one of those "two parties debate" segments talking about the snow removal issues in New York and New Jersey and the flight delay fiascos that resulted. Hidden in the debate was an industry apologist who said the airlines hadn't acted all that badly because (I'm paraphrasing) "there have been massive cutbacks in reservation staff at these airports and people can't see them in order to change their flight plans."

This is a clear result of airline consolidation and a "profit from low cost" mentality. Airlines figure they can gamble on cutting staff to raise profits, and in most cases they get away with it because there aren't many needs to change flights in most instances. However, when travel gets high and its combined with bad weather (as it often does around the Holidays), this is set up to fail, because they stay with skeleton staffs, and really don't deal with a lot of consequence for failing to serve the public, except for the occasional negative news story. Even though effective, reliable transportation is a basic need in a 21st Century society, we still think it's acceptable to make the profit motive the only one when it comes to operating our airlines. And then you wonder why we have snafu's like this when airlines take Wal-Mart approach of operations.

Second, I didn't get groped in the security lines, but I did get my 5-ounce bottle of hair gel tossed for being an apparent bomb possibility. One guy works out a plan 5 years ago and suddenly we're all suspects. Same thing for the shoe bomber dude from the early 2000s. Nearly a decade after 9/11, we never think of taking proactive actions that might predict what actions constitute a potential threat, and are left to catch up when something is tried. And we still waste hundreds of billions of dollars chasing terrorists overseas as our deficits hit record levels. We just don't learn in this country.

Even if bin Laden's dead, he's won in a lot of ways...and that pisses me off.