| Sunday, October 21, 2007 |
02:00 - That other Atlanta airline
|
(top) |
I just got back from a long weekend in New York, and on the return trip I flew on AirTran, the airline owned by Dr. Tran. They bill themselves pretty forthrightly as a "budget" airline, by trumpeting their low fares as their flagship feature, and "excellent service" (as stated in the President's letter in the inflight magazine) only secondarily. No in-seat AirFones, no LCD TVs, and my reading light kept flicking on and off and waking up the guy next to me, making him more and more irritable the further west we got. The aforementioned magazine, Go, is perhaps the most poorly-edited such publication I've ever seen, awash in walleyed, close-quarters repetitions of self-consciously "clever" turns of phrase, "xeroxings" of words like "imagineer" and "white bronco", and homophonic misspellings like "stationary", "discrete", and "caché". True, they've got an all-brand-new fleet of Boeing planes, but I half suspect the main reason for that is so they could get the new ones with the giant winglets so they can print "airtran.com" on the inward-facing panels so the passengers can see it every time they look out at the landscape.
But this has got to be the ultimate expression of the cost-conscious modern airline. I'm not sure whether it's funny enough to be pathetic, or pathetic enough to be funny. This is what they serve, in lieu of a meal or even a snack box, on a transcontinental flight:
 
Some airlines can get away with touting their lack of amenities as a feature, but somehow I don't think these guys quite have the knack.
Then again, though, when I was boarding at White Plains airport, all six or seven other airlines at the checkin counter had lines with no more than two or three people each, whereas AirTran's line was about thirty deep. Some other passengers and I were noting wryly to each other as we waited that this seems to be the way things are going these days: price is king, and we're perfectly willing to give up those things we might otherwise or once upon a time have considered essential amenities—up to and including non-stop itineraries—in favor of the clearly best fare.
Still, though: "How to eat gourmet pretzels on a low-fare airline". Damn.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
