Ask Terry Trippler

That’s one reason why our Web site encourages people to go to the airline’s site. We’re not trying to make money by selling tickets. That function is there as a service for subscribers, but when we do our news, we’ll say, ‘Check airtran.com. Check nwa.com. Go to american.com.’ The best deals generally come from the airline. It wasn’t that way a few years ago, but airline Web sites have really gotten pretty good.

Is this hell? No, it’s coach.

What once was a luxurious way to travel has become mass transit, no question about it. I have claustrophobia, and I do not fly coach. I’ll stay home first.

I laugh when I hear the announcement, ‘In case of emergency . . . . ’ Hey, in case of emergency, we’re all going to die, because there’s no way we’re get- ting out of here. We’re packed in like sardines.

Why that low fare he’ll help you find shouldn’t exist

It used to be that if you missed a connection or your flight got canceled, an airline could put you on another plane pretty quickly. As recently as five years ago, if you heard somebody say, ‘My flight got canceled, I’m stuck overnight,’ at least that probably was an evening flight.

Today, if a flight is canceled, you might not get out for two or three days. That’s become increasingly common. And it’s going to get worse this summer, when we’re expecting load factors above 90 percent.

Here’s what’s happening: Load factors [the percentage of occupied seats on an average plane] used to run at about 60 to 63 percent. So if you had 200 seats on an airplane, 120 of them were occupied. If the flight got canceled, the airline needed to move 120 people. The next plane going to Dallas or wherever also had 200 seats and only 120 people. So you had 80 available seats right there.

This summer, that 200-seat airplane might have 191 seats occupied. When it cancels, you’ve got to move 191 people. But the next flight to Dallas has only eight seats available, the one after that has 12, an American flight has four—there’s just no airplane to put those people on. The airline wants to get you out of town, but there’s no way to do it.

It’s one thing to get people where they’re going a few hours late. It’s a completely different thing to get people where they’re going two or three days late. That’s where the airlines have crossed the line into inexcusable service.

If you have to raise your fares to lower your load factors, then do it. Do it proportionately, so you’ll make the same amount of money on that airplane. We cannot go through situations where people are driving a thousand miles because they can’t get a flight for three days. At that point, the air transportation system is ready to collapse.