Frank: I’m Air-Sick and, No, the Sack in the Seat Pocket Won’t Help

The driving distance from State College to Dallas is 1400 miles. That’s 24 hours behind the wheel — longer if you want to eat, sleep and not wear a diaper. 

This makes the Big D a highly impractical weekend destination for a road warrior from Central Pennsylvania. Fortunately, there are flying machines. So it was that I was able to get to Texas for my sister’s birthday celebration last week without canceling classes or skipping meetings.

I say this by way of acknowledging the sheer marvelousness of air travel before I spend the rest of this column hating on it.

Take my Dallas trip. Call me a cheapskate, but I don’t like to pay extra for a seat. Since strap-hanging is not an option, as it is on the New York City subway, it seems to me that what you have bought when you buy a plane ticket is not permission to board the aircraft, but a seat on it. 

Had there been any no-extra-charge seats on my SCE-PHL or PHL-DFW flights, I would have selected one. There weren’t, but no biggie: Many’s the time I’ve been assigned whatever seat was open, gratis, at the gate. 

This time, that strategy almost backfired. The flight was overbooked. The airline was offering $1,400 to wait a day. When too few of us jumped at the offer, the gate agent summoned me. As the last to get a seat, I was going to be first to get bumped. 

I explained that if I were delayed 24 hours, I might as well not go. The agent was deeply unsympathetic. “Everyone needs to get somewhere,” he said.

Yeah but…

Eventually, enough of my fellow flyers took the $1,400: I got on. 

The flight to Philly takes an hour. After a while, it occurred to me that we had been in the air longer than that. The flight deck soon told us why: emergency vehicles on the runway in Philly. We were being diverted.

After a while, we landed. 

“Welcome to Salisbury,” the flight attendant said. 

I looked out the window to my left. A sign said, “Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.” Should I be alarmed that our crew didn’t seem to know whether we were in Pennsylvania or Maryland?

Then I looked out the window to my right. Should I be alarmed that a plane was on fire?  Huge wall of flame. Many firefighters on scene, spraying away. 

After a while, I decided this was a training exercise, mostly because the plane looked like it hadn’t flown in decades. Still, I thought our crew should have clued us in.

In W-B/S, we refueled, waited, took off. By the time we landed in Philly, I had missed my flight to Dallas. Happily, there were others – one of the more compelling reasons to live near a major airport.

The Dallas flight, mercifully, was uneventful. The taxiing, though: We bumped along for so long that I wondered if we’d flown to Houston and were driving the rest of the way. I also wondered, not for the first time, if we’ll ever have airships that can take off and land like helicopters so we won’t need all that taxiing time and all that airport acreage. 

Taxiing, the plane made a maddening whiny noise. I wondered, not for the first time, why planes have gotten no quieter in the half-century I’ve been flying. Maybe the airlines figure everyone has noise-canceling headphones, so why bother? 

I have noise-canceling headphones, but – I know; I’m weird — I don’t like pressing objects into or against my ears. So I left them home. At least, I thought, the noise hasn’t gotten worse, unlike just about every other aspect of the flying experience. 

Which brings me, not for the first time, to the lack of legroom and the weakness of the argument that more room = fewer seats = higher fares. The CEO of this outfit makes $14 million a year. I rest my case.

Seated in the last row (no tilting back, right by the lavs), I also wondered, not for the first time, why American aircraft and jetways can’t be configured so that we could emplane and deplane fore and aft, like they do in Europe – you know, so getting on and off would take half the time.  

Finally, I deplaned. Lovely time with family. Weirdest moment: a restaurant where, at 7 p.m., everyone rises for the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Ah, Texas.

Then I had to fly back – through Charlotte this time. Boarding time came and went. No explanation. No way to know if one could leave the gate area to get a bite to eat. 

The delay lasted 90 minutes. Fine. Feces occur. But keep us informed, will ya?

I don’t mean to be bratty. Like I said, I’m grateful air travel exists as a transportation option. I’m even grateful the Dallas-Charlotte flight offered chocolate chip cookies instead of those boring Biscoffs.

But I hate the way the airlines treat their customers. And I hate the whole loud, cramped, soul-less experience.