The trouble is, American Airlines must be in with a shout of being the World's shittiest airline, so these lovely, smiley people just show up even more how the rest of the staff are surly time-servers who patently don't want to be there (or, rather, perhaps they do, but only if all the passengers will please just disembark right now, leaving them to it).
I can understand the staff's attitude. Everything is pared to within a grudging inch of its life, like the cheapest (and I mean that in all senses) budget airline. Headphones on this 5 hour flight? Yes, sir, that'll be two dollars. A glass of wine with what they laughingly think of as "food"? That will be no less than seven bucks.
On the short haul service (and that was the 5 hour job) you had to buy any food you might want except that, er, there was no food on board for you to buy other than bucket-sized packets of synthetic chips served with buckets of Coca Cola (diet, obviously...).
Having just connected to it from another shitty American Airlines flight (two hours, sir), which also had no food, but which also contrived to arrive so late that there was no time at the connecting airport to buy anything from the shops, that was a total of 8 hours in the "care" of American Shitty Airlines, all with no food. God Bless America(n).
On a subsequent intercontinental service, tiny portions of stale "food" were served up in some sort of plastic ashtray, along with two Jacob's cream crackers (not Jacob's, actually, although I can't remember the brand) and a triangle of, er, Kraft Dairylee "cheese". I am not making this up. A small bread roll was, obviously, stale. Just to provide the finishing touch.
I hear there's a sporting chance that American will enter Chapter 11 in the coming weeks. With luck they'll be taken over by someone who actually knows how to run an airline.
PS: Here's what it's really like:
Yep, that's uncannily accurate.
3 comments:
It's well known that US airlines are crap. I've flown on United several times (company policy) and it's grim.
The US crew are ancient, unhappy and unhelpful and if you get a British crew they're like something off a low cost charter flight.
I always try to fly BA or Virgin long haul. BA is uneven, but always better than a US airline.
Glad you're back.
PS Don't stop blogging.
I think it's hysterical that the US Government has had to order all US public servants only to use American-owned airlines, because until that point they were all choosing to use European ones. So much for the importance of a free market offering customer choice, eh, with brave and intensely competitive companies living or dying by the choices of their customers...
Incidentally, at one point while I was waiting at an airport it was announced that people with First Class tickets could board, then Business Class ticket holders. And then it was announced that US servicemen were going to board before the rest of us, because that was the right thing to do. Really? Stand back you slovenly disabled people and barely ambulatory geriatrics, let alone you snivelling mothers with babies -- let our brave men and women through first (but only after the very richest people had been let on, of course. Money talks, after all, and wealth always comes before everything else).
Is it just me, or is the US becoming uncomfortably Roman in the primacy accorded to militarism?
I also got a bit annoyed with some twangy-accented captain who kept addressing me as "folks". I am not his folk, and nor do I want to be. In fact, he can just folk off.
In my limited experience, United is somewhat better than American. On one memorable American Airlines trans-Atlantic flight, we were told that we could not move beyond our own seating zone. This limited the ability to do any sort of exercise to relieve the tedium and, perhaps marginally more importantly, the risk of DVT. The impression given was that capital punishment or, if lucky, severe physical maiming would be the penalty for straying beyond the boundary. And the snack 'breakfast' was vile, packeted, junk food: God help America if that's what the average American eats.
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