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Flight of Fancy
Ask Chris · February 9, 2000

Q: I have been in the travel industry for 37 years and have flown first class and economy class all over the planet. As with everything else today, people don't know what good service really is.

Thirty years ago, National Airlines used to have serving carts in first class with chaffing dishes (yes, an open flame on an aircraft) brimming with delectables. Meat carved at your seat. Full cutlery, and not today's practice of wrapping your utensils in a napkin.

American Airlines had beautiful banquette seating in the "foyer" of first class. Boarding a United Airlines flight to Hawaii in 1967, I found cocktail napkins and matchbook with my name embossed on them. And my meal was precisely what I had ordered three days prior, when reconfirming my flight.

First class used to be all this, plus fresh flowers, a separate boarding area, private lounge, and fawning flight attendants. Pan Am used to have a private dining room upstairs on its 747s. Once, Delta offered private staterooms on its 747s.

I remember waiting for a United flight to Hawaii sometime in the early '70s. The first class passengers waited in a beautifully appointed, oddly-shaped lounge. When the flight was called, a door opened and we stepped from the lounge directly into the aircraft.

In recent years, I have been totally overlooked for meals several times. The cabin staff on an American Airlines Santiago-Miami flight never served me, and when I brought this oversight to the purser's attention, he said, "Oops. Well, you'll get a nice breakfast on your connecting flight to Dallas."
Wanna know what was on that menu? Cold cereal, a banana, a muffin, and a small fruit cup. On a plastic tray.

Two nights ago, flying coach on American, I struggled to get out of my jacket and find a place to put it while a stewardess sat on her butt six feet away and watched.

Is the problem now is that the accountants control aircraft design and service, and that the results are not in the passengers' best interests?

-- Peter Fulton Foss

A: Your question arrives at an interesting time. Earlier this month, American Airlines decided to extend its seat pitch in economy class from about 31 inches to as much as 36 inches.

At a news conference in Washington, American Chairman and CEO Donald Carty said, "We believe that transforming our aircraft to offer more room throughout coach makes good business sense and is the right thing to do in today's competitive environment."

What he didn't really say was how it made sense. He left that to the airline reporters in the audience, most of whom couldn't remember life before deregulation.

Your letter reminds us that there was a time not so long ago when 36 inches of legroom might have been considered uncivilized. It makes me, as both a traveler's advocate and a passenger, go looking for other reasons for American's decision to "add" extra legroom.

One of the most compelling explanations I've heard is that the carrier's yield management system - the most sophisticated in the business - will easily make up for the shortfall in seats. So American was, in effect, giving up nothing.

Another reason is that AA was playing catch-up to rival United, which created a new "third" class of service when it carved up a new cabin on some of its aircraft with 35 inches of pitch in the seats. This also has some merit

A third, and even more plausible reason, is that the airline's customer service department was growing tired of hearing complaints about the legroom in tourist class. There are reports that on some of the short-haul flights, the airline had brought the amount of space between seats down to 29 inches in an effort to squeeze in more passengers.

With the debut this spring of all-first class carriers such as Legend Airlines American must have been feeling the heat to loosen the vise grip that it subjects customers to.

As a sidenote, the one airline that now has egg on its face is TWA, which earlier this decade created "Comfort Class" with about 35 inches of legroom and then had second thoughts when none of its competitors followed it. The St. Louis airline replaced the more comfortable seats with the old ones just two years ago.

But in the end, this isn't about American or TWA or any of the other airlines, but about how the airline industry lies to us:

  • When it says, "We're giving you more legroom," it's lying. It's simply returning what it stole from us after deregulation.
  • When it says, "We're doing this for you," it's lying. It's doing it for itself, for its shareholders and to preserve its profits.

  • And when it says, "We're doing the right thing," you know it's lying. It hasn't done the right thing since the Carter administration.
Peter, thank you for your letter. It shows just how much we've lost during the last generation of air travel, and how naïve we would be to believe anyone who suggests things are getting better.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. Ask Chris appears weekly on this site.