Raging Against the Wind

Dec. 7, 2005 — -- Ah, late fall! The season for holiday travel, crowded airports, snowstorms, and pea-soup fog that not even the TV weatherman saw coming. Translation: severe weather delays in air travel.

The syndrome is hardly new. By now any regular airline customer has gathered a few war stories about flights canceled, delayed, or made miserable by bad weather -- sometimes even when the storms were halfway across the country and nowhere in sight.

Blessedly, most such delays end up being fairly brief, and many involve little more than a 15-minute hold at the departure gate while air-traffic controllers adjust the flow across the nation to keep everyone moving efficiently around the offending weather. But sometimes when things get really snarled up (such as when a major cold front is marching toward your airport) you find yourself all snug and warm in an aluminum tube that doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Often when that happens, your first notice of the problem is an announcement from the cockpit about air-traffic control and storms and something called a "gate hold," initial details often lost to loud cell phone conversations in the adjacent seat and wimpy PA speakers.

What the captain means is that the flight is going to be late getting airborne, and it is at that critical moment of first contact about the delay that a heavy responsibility descends on the shoulders of the flight crew. Not the operational responsibility. That's constant and immense (when and whether to fly and what route and fuel load to use). No, the responsibility I'm talking about is one the airlines have forever refused to face, let alone specifically train their pilots to handle -- a responsibility that spans the knowledge of human psychology and a half century of modern airline experience. In short, the responsibility to maintain constant, meaningful, honest and timely communication with one's passengers from the cockpit!

It's a sad fact that cockpit PA announcements are perhaps the most outrageously overlooked duties entrusted to airline pilots, especially since such announcements (or lack of them) can make the difference between a shared inconvenience and a riot.

Think about your own experiences. When the schedule is going to heck in a handbasket, how many among that increasingly disgruntled collection of fellow travelers (sardined into outrageously diminished seat "pitches") are acutely aware of the dynamics of what happens when aviation schedules and aviation weather butt heads? How many of us comfortably understand the relation of wind speeds and "active cells" to the concepts of "keep my posterior perfectly safe" and "why can't we just fly around it?" Oh, sure, there are probably a few of us off-duty airline pilots in the cabin on most every flight who do understand, but the vast majority of the folks on the average airliner know zip about the technological complexities of who, what, where, when, how, and why we're still at the gate!

Now, couple that reality with what is often a scary display of lightning and rain (or snow) outside the windows, the fact that the jetway has long since been pulled, and one of Boeing's finest is now a static display rocking on the ramp in the wind, throw in rising temperature levels and humidity, a well-stocked screaming-infant section in full cry, and a back-and-forth series of commands to shut down your electronics or fire them up, and even Ghandi could be forgiven for slipping into a snit.

The only thing -- and I do mean the only thing -- holding back the tide of potential human psychological overreaction is the voice of the captain calmly and continuously updating and explaining what is happening in terms normal humans without pilot licenses can understand.

The problem is, there aren't all that many captains out there who do this right because there are almost no captains out there formally trained and checked on how to do it.

Of course airline managers argue that there's no money for such frills and extras, thanks to airline deregulation. When you're bleeding billions, it's hard to even pay for basic pilot flight training. But with increasing passenger discontent, investing in a solid training program to assure excellent and continuous pilot hand-holding of the passengers when things get problematic is a verifiably important aspect of retaining market share. One outraged customer, after all, can cancel the effect of a hundred thousand or more of happy-talk advertising. But few airlines -- if any -- have ever devoted time and attention to helping their pilots develop finely-tuned skills in communicating with their passengers.

Not that a staggering number of captains don't already have a native ability (and an understanding of people) to do it anyway. But the scandal is that an airline industry in which the phrase "passenger service" has been reduced to an oxymoron has long assumed that keeping you informed is a discretionary function left to men and women whose stock in trade is technical excellence, not necessarily communication.

Back to the aluminum tube. Departure time has come and gone by five minutes, there's an electrical storm outside sufficient to light a horror flick with a castle on a hill, and you hear the PA click with the calm tones of the captain (male or female) following.

Here's the point: If you continue to hear those calm tones telling you precisely what's happening in layman terms, including what the crew does or does not know, along with explanations of how the system works, what the captain has created is a community with a shared and understood problem. Without that -- or with a poorly done version -- what we have is people who have paid to go somewhere on time who don't understand why that isn't happening, and whose irritation is being fed by speculation, grumbling, group discontent, and the general feeling that everyone aboard is being lied to and the crew doesn't care.

And no matter how good they are on the PA, flight attendants cannot substitute for the pilots on matters such as these.

Why do you need to know this if you're not the chief pilot of an airline? Because when an aircrew and its captain does it right, you need to write a complimentary letter as well as thank the pilots on the way out of the aircraft. When it's done wrong, you need to chronicle the reaction and write a letter to the airline's leadership suggesting they consider a training course, not just for that captain, but for all their pilots. And this is as true for Jet Green and Air Upstart as it is for EBA, (Enormous Bankrupt Airline).

This is not a matter of blame. It's a systemic inadequacy that has plagued the industry for decades, and the guys and gals with four stripes who communicate wonderfully through native ability have been left to carry those who have never been given the chance to learn.