Last week I saw the future of flying in America, and I didn’t like it. See if you don’t find this experience disturbingly familiar. 

I was scheduled to fly to Chicago to give a speech. Four hundred people had signed up to see me. I couldn’t afford to miss my flight, so I got to the airport early. As I sat by my gate, doing a Sudoku puzzle to kill the hours, I heard the ticket agent announcing that flight something-or-other to New York was overbooked and the airline would pay money to anyone willing to give up their seat. A bunch of people lined up, took the money, and left.  But then the same woman came back on the P.A. system to tell passengers the flight was still “really overbooked” and more would have to stay home today, and the airline was offering a bigger bonus now, so come and git it. More people lined up.  A little later the agent came on to say:  well, not enough of gave up your seats so now we’ll have bump some of you at random. She proceeded to read a list of names,  and if your name was on it, you weren’t getting on that flight.

“Poor bastards,” I was thinking. “Glad I’m not going to New York.”

Just then they started announcing that my flight was overbooked. Same deal: come get a voucher, we’ll pay you to fly another day.  Many lined up to take the deal, but not me: I had to get to Chicago that night, my speech was at nine the next morning, I had a lot of income at stake, and besides, people were counting on me.

Then my flight was delayed. And delayed again. And delayed some more. Weather, I was told. You know how it is in the Midwest. I called some people I knew in Chicago to ask, what’s the weather catastrophe over there. They said, “What catastrophe? A thunderstorm went through a few hous ago,  but it’s beautiful now.”

Just then my flight was cancelled. Yup, just plain cancelled. We were told to make other arrangements. I started calling right away, knowing that several later flights were scheduled for Chicago that day–but guess what?  All of them were overbooked. Already overbooked, every one of them. And not just from San Francisco, but from every possible connecting city. As it turned out, there was no way to get to Chicago that night. 

Meanwhile, the airline agent was hectoring us through the P.A. system: “People! Please don’t scream at us. Screaming at us won’t do you any good.”

So I went home. Eight hours wasted. That night I read that 400 flights had been cancelled into Chicago, and travel was disrupted all over the country.

Remember that phrase. You’re going to hear it a lot in days to come: “…and air travel was disrupted all over the country…” The day after my fiasco on American Airlines, United Airlines had a computer glitch in new York—and flights were canceled or delayed all over the country. The day after that I heard a radio report about people having trouble getting on Southwest flights to Los Angeles. The next day, something happened in Dallas, and the ripple effects were felt everywhere.

Each incident had its own unique explanation. Here it was a thunderstorm, there it was a computer glitch, somewhere else, it was a mechanical defect. But I think they all go back to one root cause: every airline is overbooking every flight. There always were thunderstorms. There always were mechanical glitches. What’s different now is that when the least little thing goes wrong, the airlines can’t take up the slack by moving stranded passengers to other flights. 
And how could it be otherwise? This is simply how the rising cost of fuel is manifesting. For some reaosn, it can’t manifest as higher ticket prices, or at least it doesn’t. Air travel remains shockingly cheap. Somehow, the economics of the business prevents any airline from raising prices because some other airline will then drive it under. There’s always another fare war, always another discount airline launching. to get by, therefore, airlines have to make sure that every seat is filled on every flight.  So they overbook them, routinely.

The end result: if you plan to fly someplace, good luck. If everything goes perfectly—all over the country—maybe you’ll leave on time. If not—if anything big or small goes wrong anywhere—you might not get off the ground at all.