ljplicease | Dec. 21st, 2009

Tonight for my sleepless jet lag rant I will cover the subject of flying.

Airline preferences are a funny thing. My mum likes to fly United because on any given flight she has a better than even chance of getting a free upgrade to business class because she flies so much for work. Of course if she’d been flying Qantas/American all of this time I am sure she’d have all the same perks with them. I prefer Qantas, because I will never fly enough for the airlines to treat me any better than the turd that your dog poops out when you walk him around the park, and I think their cattle class is better. I have to say though, if you do have to fly United, their economy plus is definitely worth the extra cost. Ty at work complained bitterly about United my last day at work because they failed to clean the toilet once. Given Ty is an idiot I doubt it is as simple as that. My godmother hates Qantas because she says the service is terrible. She usually flies business class too, although in her case she is wealthy enough to pay for it. Until recently the only choices for flying to the states from Australia was Qantas and United, so favour for one usually implies disfavour for the other if you frequently go to or live in Australia.

My girlfriend shuddered at the idea of flying Delta to Australia because she said their domestic service sucked. I figure the LAX <-> SYD flight ought to have better service than the domestic flights and I actually used to fly Delta SWF <-> SLC via CVG all the time and on average I thought the service was pretty good. I even have a frequent flier number with Delta. I usually don’t collect enough miles to get a free flight before they expire though. My friend E says that they suck for international, so who knows, since I haven’t flown the new Delta LAX <-> SYD route yet.

America Worst was hands down the worst airline in history. I don’t think I was ever on one of their flights that was on time. TWA stranded me once in STL when I was like ten (or thereabouts). I wasn’t sorry to see either go bust. Mum liked TWA because she had some of the same perks she has now with United, but they didn’t transfer well into American when they took over TWA. It was probably a mistake on American’s part not to woo their TWA customers in that transition.

People talk shit about Southwest because all they serve is peanuts, but I have always had a soft spot in my heart for them because they

serve Dr Pepper.
have pretty much the fastest turnaround time of any airline, and an on time record to be envious of
go out of their way to let the passengers know when something goes wrong and what they are doing to fix it

Of course the last time I flew Southwest was years ago so none of that may be true/relevant any more. The only reason I haven’t been flying them is because their routes aren’t good for the places I want to go now.

Generally flying domestic in Australia is a fricking dream compared with flying in the US. The two major reasons for this are the lower volume of traffic and the lack of TSA. Flying in Hawai’i was less emotionally draining than mainland US, but still not as pleasant as flying in Australia. Mum mentioned that Henry hadn’t flown in 8 years and I don’t know why, but I wondered if it was because of September 11. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I knew someone who didn’t fly because of terrorism. Statistically its way safer to fly than it is to drive, but you don’t see people not driving because they might get in an accident. In part I think this is psychological and has to do with a sense of control, but I also think there is a media connection. The number of deaths on the road ought to be scandalous, given the death toll threshold established by other “newsworthy” disasters, and I think if it were news then Americans would do something about it. Whether or not it would be effective or not is another thing, I personally don’t feel any safer with the TSA than I did under the previous system, although I do definitely feel more harasses by it. In Australia the road death toll actually is reported as news, especially around the holidays, maybe because people in Australia fly a lot less. Clearly that is my thing only. I think most people shrug at the inconvenience and feel safer for it. Maybe they even are safer for it.