The Unfriendly Skies

After reading about American Airlines grounding 3,000 flights and having recently been subject to the pain and horrors of having a flight cancelled I couldn’t help but wonder to myself how we can get air travel so wrong? It seems almost every day if you open up the green section of the USA Today you will read about some airline filing for bankruptcy, hiking fares, merging, or other usually negative financial news. At the same time you will hardly ever find a frequent flyer who has anything nice to say about the status of the American airline industry. It seems to be a broken system.

I actually found out an interesting fact the other day and the more I thought about the more I realized that it is true, only American airline companies are allowed to fly between American cities. I suppose I commend the idea behind this, but the simple fact is American airline companies can't get it right and foreign airlines do. I was looking up reviewers rankings of worldwide airlines and it turns out there is only 1 American airline (JetBlue) that shows up as either a 4 or 5 star rated airline, the rest are foreign airlines. So it's not as if it can't be done. We need to open up the country for foreign competition, we allow it in everything else. Why are we so concerned with only American airlines flying around the country, yet we don't care about the manufacturing jobs that are outsourced all over the place, or foreign automobiles that almost dominate the market right now? It makes no sense to say on one hand we need to protect the American airlines, yet allow every other industry to open it's doors and bring in foreign competition.

Yet another questionable practice that I have noticed is the fact the government has continually bailed out failed airlines. Almost all the American air carriers have continually been bailed out of their own financial mismanagements. United, Continental (twice), and Delta have all declared bankruptcy only to have the federal government assist in their recovery. It's ridiculous to claim a free market economy when the government rewards poor business by allowing the company to stay in business.

Airline travel in this country is nightmare and the management of US airlines is atrocious. We need to allow for foreign competition the same way we do in almost any other industry in the country and let the market decide who fails and who lives. That’s the American way, not the way it has been going. Until that happens it looks like we’ll be stuck with poor service, cancelled flights, and jets that are falling apart.