told me. But without thinking, she had left her purse and boarding pass with her family at the gate, on the other side of security. And worse, a few minutes earlier, at 10:30 P.M., the security checkpoints had closed. The Transportation Security Administration is a bureaucracy. When it closes, it closes. At 10:30 P.M., you can go through. At 10:31 P.M., you can’t. So she was stuck.
I could have told her that I was unable to help her, then gotten into the hotel van and driven off. But that wouldn’t feel right. I took out my cell phone and called a couple of people in operations. I gave them her name, her cell-phone number, and tried to see if they could somehow help her get back to the gate—or at least get her a voucher for a hotel room.
I don’t know what became of that woman that night. But I felt I had to try to help her. As a human being, I couldn’t just go to the hotel and leave her behind.
Again, it hardly took any effort on my part. Besides, I don’t want to go through life as a bystander.
WHEN THERE are maintenance issues or other delays, I believe in telling passengers exactly what is going on. Sometimes a plane has to be taken out of service after passengers are already loaded and ready to go. I don’t like to leave it to flight attendants to give the bad news. I get on the public address system, and offer up the details. I have stood in the front of the cabin, where the passengers can all see me, and I’ve said: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain. This airplane has to be taken out of service, so we’re going to have to change airplanes. We’ll need to get off this plane and the gate agent will send you to the new gate. I appreciate your patience, and I apologize for the inconvenience.”
When I do this I also want to protect the flight attendants from any kind of whining or abuse as people deal with the delay. “I’m the one responsible for this change,” I’ll say. I’ll stand at the door as each passenger deplanes, looking them all in the eye and nodding. I want them to know that if they have an issue, they should talk to me, not take it out on the crew.
I’ve learned that word choice is so important. When there’s a delay, I like to address passengers by saying: “I promise to tell you everything I know as soon as I know it.” I’ve found such language makes a world of difference. It’s inclusive. It tells passengers our intention is to give them the whole truth, and it lets them know we trust and respect them enough to share this truth. Not being honest up front might avoid hard questions early on, but then there can be consequences for the flight attendants later, when they have to deal with passengers who feel they were lied to. It also hurts the reputation of the airline.
If passengers decide they haven’t been dealt with honestly, they get on their connecting flight feeling angry. Then a vicious cycle sets in. Passengers have already formed a negative impression of the airline, and through the filter of that negativity, they start finding things that support their preconceived notions. They discount things that are positive as being due to chance, and they view negative things as supporting their belief that “this is a lousy airline.”
I can avoid all that just by being straightforward with passengers from the cockpit.
For the most part, I find passengers to be considerate and understanding. Flying is not the genteel activity it once was, but given that passengers are all cooped up in a relatively small space, and that can be aggravating and uncomfortable, they tend to rise to most occasions.
A lot of times I feel for passengers, and for the situations they find themselves in given all the issues that define air travel today: enhanced security checks, more-crowded cabins, long flights without food service. I’ll try to do what I can.
Passengers often don’t know when efforts are made on their behalf by the crews on airplanes. Sometimes, we’re pulling for them—quietly or under the radar.
For instance, the airlines want flights taking off on time. It makes your airline look better when your on-time rate is higher than other airlines’. Gate agents are judged on their ability to deliver on-time departures. This can make for tension among airline employees, and it’s certainly not always best for passengers.
And so sometimes, I’ve felt obliged to stand my ground.
There was one Sunday afternoon when I was flying from West Palm Beach to Pittsburgh. There was a fairly substantial standby list of people hoping to get on the plane. Everyone with an assigned seat was loaded on, and then the gate agent came on the plane to say that he would close the door. He wanted us pushing back on time. I told him there were still two empty seats.
“Whoever is next on the standby list, why don’t you send them down?” I said.
The agent was having none of it. He wanted us closing the door and pushing back. He knew that his station manager’s job-performance evaluation is based partially on statistics for on-time departures. He didn’t want to get any grief from his superior, and so he didn’t want to take a few more minutes to get two more passengers on the plane.
I understand the ramifications for everyone in the airline system. The station managers dump on the agents. The agents push the crews to load faster. The statistics-driven system is not forgiving if, say, six people in wheelchairs have to be loaded, and that slows down boarding.
Anyway, this gate agent and I were at odds over these two empty seats that I wanted to fill. I had to speak up.
“Let’s remember why we’re here,” I told him. “We’re here to get paying customers to their destinations. You have two paying customers out there who want to be on this plane, and there are seats available for them. So I say, let’s quickly get them on board.”
I prevailed. After all, the policy manual says the captain is in charge. And so the two passengers at the top of the standby list were invited onto the plane, and we ended up pushing back two minutes late. We may have been a minute or two late to Pittsburgh.
The following Tuesday was my day off, and my phone rang at home. It was the assistant chief pilot. He told me that he had a letter from a passenger service supervisor in West Palm.
“They say you interfered with the boarding process, delaying the flight,” he told me. And then he started reading me the riot act. He talked to me like a disciplinarian, as if I were some renegade cowboy in the cockpit, keeping the gate agents from doing their jobs.
I was a bit peeved by this phone call.
“I care deeply about doing a good job,” I told him, “and I think there are two possibilities regarding this incident. The first possibility is that the agents were following company procedures, and the company procedures are flawed. The second possibility is they weren’t following procedures, in which case they should. We had one hundred and fifty seats, two of which were empty. I wanted to see them filled. I think that’s good for the company and good for the passengers.”
The assistant chief pilot didn’t seem pleased that I was pushing back. But we let the matter be.
Six months later, on another Sunday, I found myself in the same situation. Empty seats. People in the boarding area eager to take them. The agents wanted us to close the cabin door, I insisted that we load the passengers, and our flight left the gate six minutes late.
The agents wrote me up again. And the assistant chief pilot called me again. He was in a pissier mood this time. “The chief pilot wants to give you two weeks off without pay,” he told me.
My union rep ended up talking to management and they never went through with their suspension threat. After all, I wasn’t alone. Many captains were having to fight this battle repeatedly. And then one day, a few months later, management came out with a new memo. It stated that passengers are not to be left behind if seats are available to them. I smiled when I read that.
All of us have little battles we can choose to take on or to skip. Some captains feel as I do about these sorts of things, and they fight. Others acquiesce and give up. None of us likes leaving passengers at the gate, but some have decided: “I can’t fight so many battles every day.”
I guess I haven’t had what I call “a sense of caring” beaten out of me yet. I empathized with those standby passengers. But as important, leaving them behind just would have felt wrong. And so I acted.
These are minor things, I know. But I feel better about myself when I make these kinds of efforts. And it’s nice to feel I’m doing a little good in the process.
I’VE READ a great deal as I’ve commuted from San Francisco to my base in Charlotte. The trip across the country seems to go faster when I’m engrossed in a book. My tastes haven’t changed much since I was a boy: I continue to be drawn to history.
