Transportation Secretary Mineta to Probe Comair and US Airways

Holiday travel is a miserable thing at the best of times. Hundreds, nay thousands, of amateur travelers stand around in one’s path trying to find the way to grandmother’s house (“over the river and through the woods” no longer works since she moved into the condo in Florida). And one good snowstorm anywhere in the middle section of the country only adds to it. This year, the US enjoyed that plus two airlines essentially giving up on anything resembling a professional operation – US Airways and Delta’s Comair. Things are so bad, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta is launching an investigation.

The US Airways end of things stems from a very high absentee rate among its workers. Usually at this time of year, the company plans for 100 flight attendants to call in sick. This year, it was more like 300. And when the baggage handlers in Philadelphia didn’t turn up, neither did most of the luggage passengers had checked. Two aircraft had to make baggage only flights over the week-end to fix it.

Union officials were quick, perhaps too quick, to say that the sudden outbreak of disease had nothing to do with pay cuts the bankrupt airline is demanding to keep itself afloat. Gate attendants and reservation agents have had to give back 13% of their pay, and flight attendants are voting right now on a 9% wage cut. Maybe the union should have endorsed the sick-out. However, it appears that many of those who stayed home had sick days they had to use before taking early retirement – and whose fault is that if not management’s?

Over at Delta’s subsidiary Comair, nothing so Marxian as a class struggle caused the cancellation of 1,100 the airline’s flights over Christmas. It was a computer problem, according to the airline. That is nonsense. As most readers of this journal know (being internet savvy and hence computer literate), one is supposed to back-up data and build redundancy into one’s systems. No computer problem should be so big as to bring down a mission-critical system. What happened at Comair is the result of bad practice, bad planning and poor management. The press release on the firm’s website blamed the effects of the weather on their “operations and infrastructure.” Bad weather never crashes a well-designed computer system because no storm is big enough to take out the back-up systems.

So, the Department of Transportation is going to investigate. And hearings may turn up on a TV set nearby soon. But these are cases for shareholder and debt-holder activism. How is it possible that Christmas travel was so badly bungled? Who in management should have dealt with these problems before they arose? And what is going to be done to make next December 25 a Merry Christmas at the airports?

© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

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