Scoop the Poop Week Day 115 of 2008 251 days left in this year

PIDGIN WORD OF THE DAY—  Jas: Judge
HAWAIIAN PROVERB OF THE DAY

WEB SURF SPOT OF THE WEEK — “The Green Issue” - NYT Magazine
WEB VIDEO OF THE WEEK — National Geographic
PODCAST OF THE WEEK — Earth News
BLOG OF THE WEEK — The Environmental Blog

HISTORICAL EVENTS ON THIS DAY — April 24th

Isolated on Maui as we are, we can read about the “horror” stories of air travel, and we see the tired tourists come and go, but how bad is it? Well, after six flights and four airports I can say, really really bad.

One example: A flight one morning from Houston to Cleveland was overbooked, people were on standby and then told they had to wait nine hours for standby on the next flight. All I could think was, wait, who the hell is going to Cleveland in the first place? That many people the airlines can’t handle it? (Have they ever BEEN to Cleveland?)

Every flight I took was late taking off and late landing. What little food was served was atrocious. People were grumpy, the attendants angry, and even the pilots short tempered. The flight from Honolulu to Houston had the pilot say at one point, “Sit Down! We’re trying to take off!”

Hawaiian Airlines, perhaps in reaction to the collapse of Aloha Air, now assigns seats - no more general boarding. Aloha seems to have gone in more ways than one.

This is how bad American air travel has become. In the New York Times Monday, the recently retired CEO of American Airlines - Bob Crandall - wrote an op-ed piece saying it straight - the ONLY thing to save American air travel is government intervention. How bad is it when businesses beg for regulation, and from a bankrupt entity like the U.S. Government at that?

I say American air travel, because the rest of the world is not having this problem. I sat next to one person who had recently had a delightful flight from New Delhi to Calcutta, the food was “cuisine”, the service pleasant and the flight arrived early. In Britian, Ryanair is flying people for as little as $19 and making a profit. No American arline has made the top five airlines list in any industry publication for the last seven years. The best airline in the world? Singapore Airlines, which was until last decade classified as a third-world country.

It is a wonder to me why we can no longer do much of anything successfully in this country. 20 years ago, the thought of Calcutta brought images of starving people, poverty and the stone age to American minds. Now they serve fine dining at 30,000 feet.

Hijacking airplanes and running them into towers did not do this to us. We have done it to ourselves, through massively incompetent leadership, stubbornly ignorant communities and lack of vision.

The former Republican Strategist Kevin Phillips says it’s too late to recover any of these abilities. He calls America “the inevitable slow-moving train wreck”.

I think he was just being kind not mentioning airplanes.

– Maui Curmudgeon, somewhere over the U.S.