Flying Is Getting Bloody Miserable

I’ ve always loved flying. Historically, if I could fly somewhere, I would. Back when I lived in New York, I used to fly to Washington, D.C., rather than take the train, because, as I’ve outlined on many occasions on The Editors podcast, trains are annoying and anachronistic and a little bit communist, and they ought by rights to be destroyed with tanks and missiles by the assembled U.S. military. (Rollercoasters do not in any sense count as trains, and I will duel anyone who disagrees.) It has been my long-held opinion that there exist only two good ways to travel: by car and by plane. If the distance is relatively short, or you have enough time to enjoy the journey, cars are your best bet. If you’re going a long way, or you need to be there stat, planes are your friend. Boats, buses, hovercraft, dirigibles — they can all stuff it.

But even I am beginning to lose my patience with what has become of air travel in recent months. Since April of this year, I have taken just one flight that was not either canceled or delayed for more than four hours. The rest of them — that’s 17 in total — have been a disaster. Over the last six months, I have come to view my chance of taking the flight that I have booked in the same way as I viewed organizing a backyard barbeque when I lived at the mercy of the English weather: It could happen, but, in all likelihood, it won’t. On flying days — or, rather, on days when I am scheduled to fly — I have grown to dread the buzz of my phone, which, invariably, arrives to tell me that my flight has been canceled or delayed and that my options are thus to request a refund or to rebook myself onto an alternative route that nobody but Marco Polo would consider interesting.

If I’m extremely lucky, the “when?” part of the rebooking equation is, “in five hours, so you’ll need to sleep in Dallas tonight.” Usually, though, it’s not. Usually, it’s “never,” or, at best, “in three days, if you’re willing to go via Azerbaijan.” So ridiculous have the answers to my question of “when?” become, in fact, that, on three recent occasions, I have thrown my hands up and driven the whole way instead. In May, I drove from Phoenix to Jacksonville, Fla. In July, I drove from New York City to Washington, D.C. Last week, I drove from North Florida to Richmond, Va. I would happily have driven on some of the other occasions, too, but for the fact that doing so would not have helped me, because I’d have arrived at my destination after the event to which I was headed had finished.

For some reason, it is always when I am going home — and always after I’ve promised my kids that I’ll see them before they go to bed — that the delays are the worst. Recently, I complained about this on Twitter, and I was met with a wall of indignant replies suggesting that it is a privilege to fly, and, by extension, that it is a privilege to be delayed while flying in ways that keep you from returning to your family. You will forgive me if I don’t see it this way. I am, as I often observe, remarkably grateful for . . . well, everything in my life. I’m grateful to have been born in England and to have moved to America. I’m grateful for the modern world, which I did pretty much nothing to construct. I’m grateful for the institutions that others built and defended. I’m grateful for my job, and my wife, and my children, and my parents, and my colleagues, and wine, and sunshine, and steak, and baseball, and Ella Fitzgerald, and the Pacific Coast Highway. If the question is, “Compared to your great-grandfather, who worked in a coal mine and never left his county, is your flight delay a hardship?” the answer is quite obviously, “No.”

But that’s not the question, is it? The question is, “Compared to a year ago, what is flying like?” And the answer to that one is, “It’s completely bloody miserable, actually.” While, anecdotally, I hear a lot of stories such as my own, I still am not entirely sure whether this problem is system-wide or if the Airplane Gods (Icarus?) just have it in for me at the moment. Either way, I’m growing sufficiently tired of it to have penned this rant. This year, it’s happened to me on Delta, American, United, JetBlue, and more; it’s happened in Florida, California, Arizona, New York, Dallas, and elsewhere; it’s happened when I’m going and when I’m returning and when I’m connecting. It is almost a law of the universe. In December, some friends and I are planning on going to a Jacksonville Jaguars road game that is being played a long, long way from where we all live, and, frankly, I have half a mind to tell them to take a different flight, because, if they come along with me, they’re all-but-guaranteed to be sleeping in the layover airport with no chance of parole. Perhaps I need to get into hot-air balloons.