So - here is the lovely story of my recent trip out of LAX.

I swear, I don't know how much longer I will be willing to fly into the US.

I write a blog dedicated to the Federal Aviation Administration called the FAA Follies.  The FAA has been trashed by the Bush Administration's idiotic political ideology over the past few years.  A few other blogs have been covering the story; Don Brown does a great job with his Get The Flick; there's also a couple of newer folks blogging at The Potomac Current and Undertowand Jurassic Bark.

Enough pimping (although seriously, anyone who flies on airplanes or is interested in the FAA should read each of those blogs- and the Follies, of course- every single day) and on to today's entry.

A news item in The Birmingham News on Friday, August 1:

OK, with all the hand-wringing and speeches and late-nite, GOP-only, in-the-dark House sessions and Al Gore slide shows and airlines going under and commercials about Barack Obama with the word "foreign" too close to his face and international summits on global warming and detailed comparisons of placebo gas tax holidays and demands to start drilling all over America's beaches and Rush Limbaugh Crowd's moaning about how Obama and other Democrats use private jets to get around and $4.00 a gallon gas and restaurants that have stopped serving bottled water to save oil and demands that we drill in the ANWR and Oprah plugging energy efficient light bulbs next to Leo DiCaprio plugging Priuses....

With all that, why why WHY does the cheapest ticket from Indianapolis to Seattle in the entire week that I can travel have to be the one that stops over in North Carolina?

Or the cheapest ticket from NYC to Indianapolis the one that stops in Georgia?

...although I would have preferred later.

So...this is how it ends -- a victim of an economic downturn.  Should I rant and rave?  Probably not.  Accept my fate as a matter of circumstance?  Sounds reasonable.  Get depressed about it and boohoo into a perfectly good alcoholic beverage?  Absolutely not.  Write a diary and vent?  You're damn skippy.  :)

Here's to having to re-enter the job market -- and not by choice.

More below...

America: land of innovation, of the can-do spirit, of Yankee ingenuity.

Americans were the first people in the world to declare independence from an empire -- and get away with it. Americans dug the Erie Canal, reversed the flow of rivers, invented powered flight and the skyscraper, harnessed the power of the atom, sent men to the moon and brought them back alive. We supplied the world with an abundance of food and high-quality manufactured goods. We defeated fascism, take credit for having defeated communism, co-founded the United Nations, absorbed tens of millions of immigrants and made a single people out of many. We are one goddamn amazing country.

Or at any rate, we were. Something happened to us around 30 years ago. Suddenly, things seemed so awfully difficult. Preposterous, even. Reducing poverty? Building a 200-mpg automobile engine? Signing the Kyoto Protocols? Manufacturing consumer goods domestically? Fighting crime and terrorism without recklessly abrogating civil liberties? Forget it. It's too hard. Too inconvenient. Too unprofitable. Too much of a hassle. Or it might mean that we had to follow the same rules as every other country, that our specialness didn't render us exempt.

We've turned into Emo Nation, for crying out loud.

It has finally happened, one huge industry is taking a progressive stance.  The airline industry sent me an email asking my support.

I find this pretty ironic.  one industry asking me to help regulate another industry.

I've been forwarded one variant or another of the following email by several friends:

Subject: Help Fight America's Oil Crisis

An Open letter to All Airline Customers:

Our country is facing a possible sharp economic downturn because of skyrocketing oil and fuel prices, but by pulling together, we can all do something to help now. Visit www.StopOilSpeculationNow.com.

(continued...)

I just got this letter from Delta, which was signed by 12 airlines, encouraging me to encourage the government to enforce speculation regulations with respect to oil.  It makes me wonder if Big Oil executives are getting phone calls from airlines about to go out of business, car manufacturers that are showing record losses and food retailers who are re-thinking their entire supply networks.  I mention this because when big business gets mad (not the average citizen) things tend to get done.  Chomsky noted this recently with regard to healthcare.  That universal health insurance is on the agenda this year because big companies (not the avergae citizen) are tired of paying for it.  Perhaps now the right pressure will be brought to bear on oil as well.  Here's the letter:

This won't be a jargon filled (or even very informational) economic treatise, like Jerome a Paris writes. He's the undisputed lord of the "oil barrel" price diaries here,(IMHO) and I have no wish nor ability to step into his territory.

However, I just got an email that pretty much gobsmacked me, because if things have gotten to the point where we consumers are being asked to demand regulation from Congress...BY A HUGE CORPORATION, well...things have pretty much jumped the shark, and then some!
~~Follow me over the fold~~

Mr. Robert L. Crandall is retired CEO of American Airlines and understands what we need to bring our transportation plan into the 21st Century. We are falling behind in updating our infrastructure and meeting the needs of our population.

Following is a speech Mr. Crandall made to The Wings Club. It's lengthy, but every word is important. I plan to send copies via e-mail AND fax to my Representative and two Senators. It's time . . .

Now the US Transportation Security Administration wants to see what's underneath your underpants.

Details after the jump...

Long, long ago -- the 60s -- when I was but a tyke, I looked forward to summer for one reason:  the big vacation.  For our family, it was almost always the same thing:  we'd fly to Southern California to spend time with my grandmother in La Jolla and then to my great uncle's place in Anaheim.  And Anaheim meant Disneyland.  

For a middle class kid from the Chicago suburbs, jetting out to a beachside hotel in San Diego was so cool.   We had to wear our Sunday school clothes on the airplane.  Flying was a special event, and was treated by us and everyone else accordingly.

Alas, times have changed.  And it's still getting worse.  Let's go look for your lost luggage below the fold.

My kid flies four or five times a year to visit. The airline I have to use just announced today that they're raising the fee they charge for unaccompanied minors by 150%!

American Airlines is now going to begin charging you to check ANY bags. They're also going to charge you more for every other hidden fee and surcharge they rip you for.

I hate flying to begin with. I hate being crammed into a plane with no leg room, no room to recline. I hate delays and cancellations. In short, I hate flying.

My family is hosting an exchange student from Germany for the year.  He has been fascinated by our political process, American sports and even Cincinnati chili.  He has made friends here, been very sucessful in his grades and even become something of an expert on the US Constitution, through a program at the school.  

Mostly, he has been impressed with his time here in America.  I suppose his standards are a little low, as he was impressed when I took him on a visit to Pittsburgh, but I'm proud to say that we're sending a friend of the United States back to Germany this summer.

These past two days haven't been one of the highlights of his trip, though.

Their web site says to check in with them or the airline 24 hours before the flight.  Okay.  My flight from LAX at Expedia said it was leaving at 10:40 am, flight 272.  The 4 of us got there and reached the counter at 9:30 am.  Where we were told our plane had already left at 9 am.  We were able to reschedule with a red-eye 12 hours later, rent a car to take us the 80-minute-drive home, and miss the first day of our vacation.  Expedia on its website appears to guarantee an accurate schedule.  When
I retutned home and logged in, they were still listing the 10:40 am time.  And now they are wasting the rest of my day by simply leaving me on hold.  Can this web site really be trusted if it can't be relied on for real flight times, despite a guarantee, and then treats its customers like this?

Amid last week’s terrible ructions in air travel, will no one point out the part of all this that is most politically and socially significant?

No, I am not referring to the stunning levels of ineptitude, revealed by the FAA -- a story that has grown commonplace, under a regime that relentlessly undermines professionalism at every turn.  Although it is meat for passing headlines, the real story is something more insidious. And politically devastating, if the public is ever finally roused.  

Would this state of affairs ever have come to pass, if society’s elites had reason to care about the health of modern commercial air travel?

This morning, just a few minutes ago, Erin Burnett of CNBC was on Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough calling for the nationalization of an industry. Was it the healthcare industry so we could all benefit from taking profit out of the business of keeping people healthy, no? It was nationalizing the airline industry because it is hemorrhaging money.
Ms. Burnett has apparently looked over the profit reports of the airlines and determined that when you balance their profit and loss reports for the whole time they have been in existence they have lost money. I'm sorry I don't get it. We should nationalize an industry that only affects a certain segment of the population because they can't make a profit. This while being completely hands off the healthcare industry that affects us all.

So, I’m reading MSNBC when I find this article on the ATA bankruptcy filing

Airlines are struggling with rising fuel prices, labor strife, depressed ticket demand and heightened competition, said George Godlin, an analyst for Moody’s Investor Service.

"We’re in a perfect storm kind of environment right now," he said.

Okay, so, I’ll bite, there’s going to be a mention of "labor strife" in this article, I'm sure of it and they'll tie it to the current problems for Aloha and ATA.

Want more?