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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
"I'd like to welcome you to Honolulu. Unfortunately, we are in Fresno." Public-address announcement hysteria rules the skies.
Apr 23, 2004 | The voting period for the Ask the Pilot readers' poll has been extended a third week. Please send your choice of favorite and/or least favorite airline prior to next Friday, April 30, to Ask the Pilot.
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By nature the airlines are secretive animals. Even paranoid. There's a chicken-or-the-egg thing at work here, as to whether secrecy breeds contempt or vice-versa, but paranoia is perhaps natural in a corporate environment where safety and security lie at the heart of operational success. Half a billion people ride our largest carriers each year, and most, if not all of them, buckle their belts to at least a lingering acknowledgment of their own mortality. Flying is the safest way to go, everybody knows this, but statistics don't placate those back-of-the-mind apprehensions. Thus the aisles of a crowded 747 buzz with a collective unease not felt in the aisles of a Wal-Mart. The presence of fear, whether acknowledged or not, supercedes all the other latent complications, pleasures, and disappointments of travel by air.
The airlines, you could say, have nothing to fear but fear itself. An easy enough problem, you'd expect, for the industry's P.R. people and marketers to deconstruct and alleviate. Yet, after eight decades they've still not devised an effective strategy of communicating. When the shit hits the turbofan, so to speak, airlines take the Fifth and customers see red.
To passengers, the most obvious frontline symptom of this institutionalized skittishness is the dreaded public address announcement. Our air system is massively complex, increasingly high-tech, and yes, at the core of it all inherently, if not statistically, dangerous. Yet every time that microphone crackles, mostly what we hear is choreographed baby talk. Eyes begin to roll every time a customer service agent, or crewmember, opens his or her mouth. Even the most basic broadcasts are heavily fortressed: the campy legal-speak theater of the cabin safety demo, the squealy condescension of the thanks-for-flying-with-us pitch. The most innocuous anomalies have been reworded, intentionally or otherwise, into a lexicon of infantile explanations. Turbulence becomes "a couple of bumps up ahead," the complexities of air traffic control delays are reduced to "waitin' for some rain showers to pass."
The desire is to avoid confusion, keep things topical, and never, ever, insinuate danger. The result is the shaking of heads and a propensity, often enough, not to believe a word of it.
As many fliers know, Southwest is one airline that juices up its crew-passenger interaction through any number of gags, jokes, and songs. They are the exception, not the rule, and perhaps they're swinging the pendulum too far, cultivating a whole new style of in-your-face offensiveness. In the end, the art of communicating shouldn't rely on humor either.
But let's not get too academic. People don't want phony smiles or slippery excuses. They don't want to be coddled, sung to, or asked to partake in toilet paper races. They want respect, in the form of cogent answers and useable information.
And, OK, to split the difference a bit, the occasional laugh. A few columns back, I asked readers to send in their most memorable experiences with airline public address announcements, and promised to share a few of my own. Most of your submissions were pretty funny, though whether the best laughs come at an airline's behest, or at its expense, depends how sardonic -- or contemptuous -- a flier you are ...
