I love aircraft and I love to fly as the pilot. I am sadden by my most recent travel experience with commercial aviation just a few days ago. I must admit it is mostly my fault. I was looking and purchased the lowest cost, two person quick round trip.
My wife and I participated in Saturday night to Monday morning round trip between Dallas, Texas and Cleveland, Ohio. Via American Airlines on a Boeing S80 (M80).
We both required wheel chair assistance which we paid willingly $100 in tips for two chairs round trip. That cost is not the issue. In fact it helped a lot with front of the line service. That cost was expected.
The total experience including the aircraft seating, rates in my impression as lower than a cross country bus ride. I have always considered riding the long distance bus (which experience is now 40 years ago) as the armpit of transportation.
I now suspect the bus may be far better than commercial aviation in everything except speed. I haven’t taken a long train ride for about the same length of time, but I suspect it too is probably far better than present airline standards.
The check in process is horrible. No ticket agents. Everyone must cue-up for their crack at the check-in touch screen terminals. Extremely slow response and error prone with a non intuitive set of options and abbreviated instructions. It takes me two hands to fully insert a credit card and quickly pull it from the slot. (I have the same problem buying gas for the car.) Then everyone lines up again to check and weigh baggage. The problem is the carry-ons were unnecessarily in the same line. (Poor people management).
First class seats appear to be what cabin class used to be years ago. So my impression is you can get a good ride if you can and will pay for the privilege. The bulk of the passenger compartment is no more than a cattle car. The cheap seats just fit my butt at 215 pounds ( I am not obese) but larger people will certainly suffer as well as the people around them.
Baggage is so expensive and handling is so poor that 90% of the “cattle” carry on their usually over-sized multiple bags. Size standards are NOT enforced. We checked our bags so we wouldn’t have to struggle lugging them with wheel chair assistance. In baggage claim there were very few bags on the carousels. Probably less than 10 % of the passengers were there waiting on bags.
We rented a car from Avis which was also a terrible experience at Cleveland airport. The system there is a good idea that has not been managed in a user friendly way. The remote location for the cars gets it out of the airport congestion and the bus ride is not bad except for driver attitude. The facility is under manned (at least Avis) and in our case the check in computers were down. The road signs leading us back to the rental care area (after dark) were numerous but so dark and small, they could not be read farther that 40 feet away in headlights. Pitiful. Probably a city or interstate size limitation or just poor civil engineering.
I could write a 50 page report on the obvious issues that are clearly visible and experienced on our 34 hour round trip experience. It definitely was NOT a good experience and is one I do not wish to endure again. I will gladly drive two days each way, eat decent but not great food, and be in total control.
The lure is the time saved. I am a seasoned airline traveller and have flown commercial hundreds of times in my working career. I have watched as commercial air travel has become progressively more onerous. The terrorists and lowest cost commercial competition have won. Transporting humans is now a commodity bulk mass transport system. It’s right in there with bus lines and trains.
Amtrak runs both trains and buses and now needs to add airlines to their service.