Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [60]
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,