Stress In The Skies

Over the coming four-day weekend, more than 6 million Americans will board commercial flights, a record for this typically heavy holiday. While the EgyptAir crash may continue to blanket the news, fatal crashes are the exception. Last year the death rate on U.S. carriers was zero; by contrast, over last Thanksgiving weekend alone, 598 people died on U.S. highways. And yet, even as the industry rightly touts its safety record, the Unfriendly Skies have increasingly become a source of lesser horror stories.

Consider, for example, the fairly routine August experience of Christine Cunningham, who wanted only to fly from Denver to Albuquerque, N.M., with her two young kids. The short United flight was scheduled for 5:30 p.m. When she got to the gate, the flight status was listed as "delayed"; no one would tell her why, or for how long. Then it was canceled. With two kids in tow, she joined 150 or so other passengers in a mad scramble to the customer-service desk to make new plans. After 45 minutes on line, she found herself booked on an 8:45 p.m. flight. Some of her fellow refugees got food vouchers; some, like her, did not. Her flight finally took off at 9:30 p.m. "Flying used to be a necessary evil," says Cunningham. "Now it's just evil."

As we move farther into the jet age, when even midlevel professionals fly regularly for work, air travel has come to feel increasingly onerous. In a NEWSWEEK Poll, more than half of adult fliers said they were sometimes frightened when they flew; in 1983, only one third said this. Citing safety concerns, 34 percent said they avoid certain airlines, up from just 19 percent in 1983. And nearly one quarter say they "avoid flying whenever they can." Anxiety, too, is up: 43 percent said flying has become "more stressful" in recent years.

Instead of setting us free, flying has locked us in a snarl of mundane irritations: arbitrary ticket pricing, endless delays, bad food, cramped seating, stale air, dirty planes and rude service. In the first nine months of this year, the Department of Transportation received almost 16,000 complaints from air travelers, double the rate of last year (the department estimates that for every complaint it receives, the airlines get 400). There's some hypocrisy here: consumers gripe about lousy conditions but seek out the cheapest fare, giving airlines--already facing ruthless lowball competition, high operating costs and low profit margins--an incentive to cut even more. But it is the airlines that get blamed. In a recent University of Michigan study, Americans ranked 34 industries and public services in terms of customer satisfaction. Airlines finished third from the bottom, ahead of only network newscasts and the IRS.

This is not just a matter of a few passengers having a bad-air day. Changes made by the airlines, along with a rise in people flying and an antiquated air-traffic-control system, have systematically combined to make flying a bad trip. Here's a look at how.

Delays: Nothing takes the romance out of a two-hour jaunt quite like three hours of cooling your jets on the tarmac--except, perhaps, spending more than seven hours on the runway at Detroit Metro Airport without water or working lavatories, as Northwest passengers did during a blizzard last January. When asked what they'd most like to see improved in airline services, travelers say they'd like to get where they're going on time. Yet performance is getting worse, not better. So far this year, delays are up 23 percent, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The average delay is 44 minutes, up from 42 last year. Only 77 percent of flights get to where they're going on schedule.