COME FLY WITH US

Recently, the papers have been as full of airline news as the skies over D/FW are with planes. Fare wars and rumors of fare wars. Crandall’s triumphs at American. Herb Kelleher’s hands-on miracle-working at Southwest. Pat Foley’s latest strategy for getting Braniff out of the red, or at least keeping it in the skies.

That’s all fascinating, but we wonder: How many people consult an airline’s profit-loss statements before booking a flight. If you’re enjoying the glittering panorama of New York off to your left, sipping a wine that’s traveling as we as you are-or if you’re wondering when you’ll finally leave the runway, why the guy in the next seat can’t take a breath without bumping you, or where the coffee is that you ordered a thousand miles back, you’re probably not too concerned with Southwest’s chummy relations with its mechanics or the Hyatt Corp.’s oft-repeated pledgeof loyalty to Braniff.

So with you frequent and infrequent flyers in mind, we took to the skies. During August and September, 10 of our staffers logged countless air miles on nine different airlines. You name it, we’ve flown there. Denver, Miami, New York, St. Louis, Hawaii, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, Kansas City, Austin and several others, on more than 50 flights. We’ve seen those ubiquitous “Do A Daiquiri” signs in a score of airport bars. We’ve surprised many a flight attendant by exiting a plane, wandering the airport for a few minutes, then boarding the same flight right back to Dallas. Never has a staff gotten higher in pursuit of a story.

Why? To give you an edge. You see, we’ve eliminated what we call the Bad Day Factor. An airline can legitimately blame one late start, one rude reservationist or one unchewable steak on a Bad Day. But fly that airline three times in a week, on different flights and with different crews, and you begin to see patterns-and not just the ones on the seat in front of you.

Obviously, there are no really bad airlines in the sense of a bad restaurant or nightclub. The fierce ethic of competition, especially since deregulation, keeps out the third-raters. We found no wobbling nightmares looking for a crash site, no ptomaine wagons of the air. But we did find variety, nuances, gradations.

On some flights, we were pleased by service beyond the call of duty, well-prepared meals and smooth, on-time arrivals. On others we were chapped by callous attendants, lousy food and an amazing disregard for punctuality. As most flyers already know, few flights are leaving and arriving on time these days. Everyone passes the buck, but the mess is really the result of good old-fashioned capitalist greed: Too many airlines have scheduled too many flights in too few time slots. You wasted thirty minutes on the runway not due to some freak accident, but because the airlines scheduled more flights than could realistically take off at one time. As D went to press, the airlines were powwowing to see what could be done, with the government’s antitrust watchdogs promising to look the other way if the carriers could, you know, work out something maybe just a little less competitive.

Meanwhile, back on the runway, we wait to be cleared for takeoff. Suffice to say that more than 75 percent of our flights were between 15 and 45 minutes late in departing, and more than a third were late in arriving. We’ve mentioned only the worst sinners. (We’re not mollified, by the way, when a lead-footed pilot speeds up and manages to get us there on time. We fought traffic to get to the airport for an 8:12 departure. We don’t want to taxi out at 8:36 and finally lurch skyward at 8:54.) The airlines are working on the problem. Until it’s resolved, a pox on all their hangars.

About those fares: We’ve largely ignored them, mainly because they change so fast you’d expect a sonic boom. Whatever we said, much of it would be out of date by the time you finish this article. And consider: The price is the easiest thing for an airline to change. Touch a keyboard, and poof! New prices. But it takes longer to instill genuine quality into the flying experience, and that’s what we were looking for.

So here it is, our down-to-earth talk about the not-always-friendly skies. Come fly with us!