Ask Terry Trippler

Cutting to the bone

Airlines tell me, ‘Terry, the only thing our passengers care about is the lowest fare from Point A to Point B.’ They’re all afraid to post a fare even $5 above the competition’s. That means they have to cut costs. So what’s happened is that we have a race to the bottom in this industry: Let’s see who can operate an airline with the fewest employees per flight. Who the winners are, I don’t know, but the real losers are the consumers.

The airlines have laid off so much of the hired help that they don’t have enough people. A lot of them are understaffed. Number one, they’ve cut the staff too deeply. And number two, they’ve cut wages too deeply. They’ve cut everywhere. They’ve cut reservationists, so when you call you’re on hold forever. They’ve cut ticket agents and gate agents. They’ve cut baggage handlers, so it takes longer to unload bags.

Maybe on a clear day in July, with blue skies, the whole thing works. But put one snowstorm or one thunderstorm into the mix, and it collapses. You get situations like Northwest’s debacle in Detroit in January of 1999, with people trapped on planes for hours, and American parking that airplane down in Austin, Texas, for 10 hours where they wouldn’t let people off. Then, last February, the JetBlue meltdown [in which the low-cost carrier ground to a halt for a week after an East Coast snowstorm].

Once these aircraft get out of position due to bad weather or whatever, you have to reboot the airline. In other words, get this flight crew to the plane and get these airplanes where they’re supposed to be going. That’s where JetBlue had the problem. They didn’t have the computer system or the people or the experience needed to reboot the airline.

Look at the breakdown that US Airways experienced in Philadelphia because of a blizzard last winter. Years ago, if they had a situation like that they would have called in people early: ‘You’re scheduled for the three o’clock shift, but we need you in here at noon.’ One of the problems this year was that they couldn’t call in people early because for many, working for the airline is now their second job.

If your pay scales have created a situation where ‘airline employee’ is a temp job, or a job that people do only until something better comes up because they certainly couldn’t support a family on it, then you’re going to get what you pay for. One symptom will be constant turnover. So when you run into weather problems, you have all of these inexperienced people in their 20s, who may be sincere as hell, but they don’t know what to do. I heard that in the JetBlue incident, employees were coming to the airport, saying, ‘What can I do? Where can I help?’ Nobody knew what to tell them.

I believe that airline jobs should be jobs that have pride, that you can work at and live on and retire from—that this can be your job. We don’t need flight attendants or gate agents or pilots working part-time as waiters to make ends meet.