You want cheap, you get cheap

This has been a difficult year for air travelers. The popular press has been full of horror stories of people stuck on immobile aircraft for six, eight, ten hours. This is indeed a very unpleasant thought. The latest such incident was Saturday at Los Angeles International Airport(LAX), one of the world's busiest. News reports tell of how a computer failure at the US Customs and Border Control agency delayed several thousand arriving passengers for up to ten hours. Many of these apparently were left stranded on their arrival aircraft for much of this time.

The news stories in the aftermath of the LAX incident sound very familiar. Many quotes from disgruntled victims, some with hard luck stories of varying intensity, quotes from the agency spokesperson to the effect that this is all very unprecedented, that it could not have been anticipated, that it's very unfortunate, the problem will most surely be fixed soon. Also included are vague explanations regarding what went wrong. This is of course essentially the same news stories we read last winter when some unlucky people were trapped for long hours on immobile airplanes, ostensibly because of bad weather.

Except for those who suffer through the indignities, no one seems to notice these stories much. We read them, shudder at the thought of being one of the victims, and move on to the next outrage. Shelf life is about a day, maybe two if it happens in your town. We accept it as inevitable. And we may as well, because the way the air transportation infrastructure operates these days, you can expect events like these to continue and probably increase in frequency in the future.

After deregulation in the eighties, air travelers clearly indicated that what we wanted in air travel was cheap and cheaper. And, as it generally does when it comes to a discretionary activity, the market responded very nicely. New airlines were born and some prospered and grew by providing basic transportation between selected lucrative routes without food, legroom, or convenience. Redundancies were eliminated and ancillary services were cut to the bone. Established airlines scrambled to survive and some didn't. The results are in and, indeed, we have some of the lowest air fares in history. And not much else.

Delays occur for a lot of individual reasons, but by scratching the surface we see the cheap and cheaper ethos in just about every case. The Customs agency delays upgrading its equipment because the airlines and passengers complain that it would raise prices. In a similar vein, airlines have no back-up equipment if a plane must be taken out of service. Airports delay needed improvements because no one wants to pay for them.

And, not surprisingly, the airports are woefully overcrowded and inefficient. Planes that leave a gate in a snowstorm sit on the tarmac, there's no gate for them to return to. And, who knows, the weather may improve to the point where the plane can leave saving the costs of cancellation. Remember this when it's your turn to sit in a hot, stinky plane with a bunch of caterwauling children and moaning old folks for six hours or so.