The State of Flying

... is "less than ideal."

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The airline industry is a direct reflection of the current state of the union. As someone who has been on several Boeing-made airplanes over the last few months, I think about how the door—the production of which was outsourced and subcontracted by a flub-prone duopoly to save some money, while the installation and inspection of which was overseen by an overworked and multiply pressured person working in a conflicted and careless system, also to save some money—might blow off at altitude. Every headline about flying right now involves some detail about how a wing was falling apart or a plane that almost hit someone on the runway, and somehow all these issues slip further into abstraction. If these mishaps-at-altitude don’t really ding the stock price enough to bother those who are enabling or actively authoring these problems and are capable of doing something about them, then the problem only compounds and compounds.

The rise of ravening and reckless financial capitalism hasn’t really fulfilled its stated purpose of maximizing private sector efficiency; rather, it tests the limits of how much a company can make its products worse without tanking its stock price. We are moving backward into the Wright Brothers era of flying. I took a flight from Toronto to Orlando over the holidays in a brand new plane: No A/C vents over the seats and no flight attendant call buttons. We’re back to cattle class. It’s bad enough that I have to board a plane in a country plagued with severe mental illness and there is either a grown man fistfighting an invisible person in the aisle, or there is some spaz who wants to yank open the emergency exit door, and even if they can’t do it, the door will probably just fly off its hinges right after take off.

I think of how the people in charge of Boeing earn astronomical salaries when their jobs consist of squeezing quality and dignity and concern out of the labor that goes into making their airplanes. The problem with their company is the problem with every company, and it makes every aspect of life flatter and crueler and riskier and worse. Boeing is building these planes the same way that you and I build an Ikea bed frame, where we’re halfway through and we find this little bolt in a bag labeled in some incomprehensible foreign word and we wonder what it does and then assume we don’t need it. NEWS FLASH: You absolutely need those bolts.

I’m not entirely sure where this post is heading, so I’ll end it with one final thought—just let us smoke cigarettes on the planes again. If I’m leaving the fate of my existence to the laws of gravity and an overworked and underpaid aerospace engineer, I would at least like the right to rip some Nat Shermans while watching Interstellar. But the fact that some planes still have an ashtray is a clear indication of the problem.

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