Michael Jackson TalkRadio Content

ne of the promotional advertising slogans for a great airline of yesteryear used to read, "Getting There Is Half The Fun". A slight exaggeration, no doubt. But it certainly isn't the case these days and for the foreseeable future. Many years ago the US flagship carrier, Pan Am proudly made the claim, along with the likes of so many other airlines; from TWA to Western, ("The Only Way To Fly"). The list could go on and on. They and so many more are, of course, out of business. More to the point, leaving, flying and arriving safely on time, is half the anguish. The Associated Press recently ran a story headlined by some newspapers worldwide as "Airline quality in descent for third year in a row". And there is no sign of improvement on the horizon. Increasing numbers of passengers are bumped, bounced or left at the gate. A growing number of bags are lost. I find that when I check-in curbside, I tip more than is necessary in order to insure that when I go to New York, my bags don't end up in Uruguay. It never helps. To be fair it isn't the Redcaps who cause the baggage losses. I read somewhere that the literal number of complaints about airlines are not really on the increase. The worst figures are for 2005. Maybe that's because of expectations diminishing. How resigned will you be if you are stranded, left on the taxiway for hour upon hour? The JetBlue and United Airlines stories were horrendous. As Walter Cronkite used to say at the end of his famed newscasts, "And that's the way it is". I do appreciate the safety checks at the airports -it is for our collective safety. But why do we need to remove our shoes? All because one zonked-out zealot tried to explode a shoe on board an aircraft. He failed, thank God. One man, one attempted event and the whole world has to remove their shoes. Maybe we should all just wear flip-flops. We are going to see more delays, and those delays translate into less and less happy passengers. Over the coming years there will be more 'planes in the air and an air traffic control system in no way capable of handling the rate of growth, Are you finding fewer seats available, particularly if you are attempting to reclaim mileage reward seats? Just wait for the arrival of the European Consortium's super-sized two-deck jumbo jets ! Depending on configuration they can carry up to 900 passengers. Imagine the loading and off-loading of those aircraft. More delays. I was going to say that ships are more fun, and then we see the pictures of a passenger liner foundering on the rocks off the island of Santorini, in Greece. One day, maybe, we'll take a train, particularly if it travels at nearly 400 mph, as an experimental train did in France, last week. Or perhaps we should all own our own aircraft; I'm in favor of that.