Boom & Bedlam

"To travel by plane, a passenger must now sacrifice his comfort, his sleep, and often his baggage. He must endure inconveniences that rise to the level of punishment. And sometimes he finds he could have got there faster by train."

So said FORTUNE magazine this week, after a long hard look at the nation's airlines (What's Wrong with the Airlines). Except for scenery and safety, and the latter is an increasingly big "question mark," FORTUNE found nearly every phase of air travel in a mess. Examples:

Reservations and waiting lists have become a joke in many places, simply because it is much easier to. sell to the "go-show" (airline lingo for the passenger without a reservation who takes a chance on getting aboard at the last minute in place of the "no-show") than to check a long waiting list by phone.

Bus and limousine service to and from airports is "bad throughout the U.S." The average passenger spends 80 minutes per flight in uncomfortable ground travel.

Baggage service is terrible. "Some airline men believe that there is a great deal of baggage endlessly sailing the skies like the Flying Dutchman, transferred from plane to plane and city to city forever." (One Reno-to-San Francisco passenger's brief case, containing $50,000 worth of building plans, turned up days later in St. Petersburg, Fla.)

Passenger facilities at airports are usually inadequate or worse. Chicago's is "a slum. Chewing gum, orange peel, papers and cigar butts strew the floor around the stacks of baggage. ... To rest the thousands there are exactly 28 broken-down leather seats. One must line up even for the rest rooms. . . ."

As for safety: many airports are "deficient in length of runways, clearness of approaches and other features important to efficiency and safety." Landing at any airport in bad weather is a long, ticklish job. It necessitates a dangerous "stacking" in the air of all incoming traffic (see chart). Planes must fly a tight, narrowly prescribed course on instruments until, directed by ground radio to land, sometimes hours later. A plane last spring had to circle Washington airport for 5 hours.

Growing Pains. The cause of all this bedlam: 1) the sudden boom in commercial aviation; 2) airlines' management. Personnel policies are antiquated, pay is low and big-business methods are virtually unknown. Some executives believe that bigger, faster planes will solve things, forgetting that they will only cause bigger problems at obsolete airports. Rather than use the partial benefits of radar in its present form, the industry is holding out for an all-purpose system, which is at least five years away.

"If part of the trouble lies with the CAA," says FORTUNE, "it is up to the airlines to build bonfires under CAA. If part of the trouble lies in [city-owned, politics-ridden airports], let the airlines put pressure on the municipalities." In short, the airlines have a big job to do--somehow.

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