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This is possibly better saved for a small questions Sunday, but can someone explain why is the federal government up-in-arms over Southwest's latest boondoggle to me?
I understand why Southwest is getting hammered by popular opinion and in the press. I wasn't personally affected but I know a few people who were (8 hour delays, last-minute cancellations, etc) and I understand their frustration. I absolutely understand customers demanding refunds on cancelled flights or compensation for excessive delays. This, to me, is the market reacting and correcting itself. Southwest failed to deliver what it promise and it is reaping the economic and PR whirlwind.
What I don't understand are promises from both the Secretary of Transportation and POTUS to "hold the airlines accountable", which just seems weird to me. Is there a regulatory or national security reason for the Feds, much less POTUS, to be weighing in on this? Is it a straight-forward consumer protection issue or is it just the straight populist look-we-are-doing-something-to-people-you-currently-hate kind of politics that I am currently reading it as? What am I not seeing/understanding here?
I have limited insight into this: I had a former student who worked at Charles de Gaulle airport as maintenance crew, and he would explain to me the changing labour situation with respect to the airport. According to him the goal was to pare down staff to minimum required levels: anything to reduce costs was acceptable because they were in a highly liberalized market where consumers are very price-sensitive (for reasons unknown, customers discriminate by price much more heavily in air travel). That meant limiting crews, getting rid of redundancies, using third party, non-union contractors for every bit of unskilled labour, and generally running as light as possible personnel-wise. This meant that when you had those three or four days a year with bad snowstorms you got absolutely fucked and you have no one in reserve to handle the massive increase in work; but hey, that's a few days in the year and the other 360 customers get cheaper fares. People who get shafted are angry of course, but ultimately they don't interface with upper management and they forget soon anyways because hey, air travel is ridiculously cheap for what you're actually getting: unsurpassed convenience and safety for intercontinental travel.
My dad just got delayed 6 hours in Vancouver flying back (he was lucky: lots of people delayed multiple days). He couldn't fathom why every problem seemed to be someone else's responsibility (I tried to explain that job roles are heavily specialized to minimize the number of skilled labourers), why airport workers were so laid-back (it's no one's dream to load luggage, and they're not getting paid particularly well), and why in general the airport seemed entirely unused to this strange white substance falling from the sky (they know snow exists, it's just cheaper to not prepare for it).
Consumers discriminate by price heavily in air travel because it's extremely hard to compare anything except price on more than a crude level. And a lot of that is because the airlines themselves have tried to deliberately obfuscate anything that you could compare airlines on.
Also, the government has regulated away some things that airlines could otherwise compete on. You can't get an airline without a TSA check.
It's a shame too. I'd gladly pay extra - even a good bit extra - to an airline that eschews security theater. I'm quite tired of having my junk felt up every time I fly.
You must be using some weird airports if your junk gets felt up at all. And, if it is, then that is not security theater: They have evidence indicating that you, specifically, might have an gun, knife, or other dangerous item. A far cry from making everyone throw away shampoo bottles.
No, he just has to be opting out of the porno-scanner, which is still security theater.
And, were the old-style
x-ray machineswalk through metal detectors also security theater, given that hijackings plummeted when they were mandated in 1973? A lot of people here seem to rather lazily use "security theater" as a synonym for "TSA regulation I don't like."Are you by any chance deliberately conflating scanning your body with x-raying your luggage?
Anyway the answer is yes. As 9/11 showed, an airplane can be hijacked with boxcutters. Even now you can easily get weapons of similar lethality, simply after crossing the security check, meaning anything that is currently happening at the airports is nothing but a ritual. If hijacking fell, the best argument that you can make is that rituals work, not that what the TSA is doing is an actual security enhancement against a motivated actor.
Huh? No, I am talking about walk-through metal detectors.
As for the boxcutters, are you not aware that they were used because they were perfectly legal to bring on planes at the time? Is the regulation that now bans them also "secutity theater"?
And, tell me, why did the "underwear bomber" have to use some half-assed method instead of one which, you know, was more likely to work? Could it be because "security theater" prevented him from doing so?
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