Ernestine works for United now! Heck, maybe she RUNS United now….
Bob Sutton’s blog post is titled “United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn’t Care” and I believe every bit of it. I also believe this was not an isolated occurrence, because my own experience with United indicates that the airline doesn’t care, or at least allows its employees to adopt that attitude.
First, I’ll summarize Sutton’s horror story (and then on to mine): Continue reading
If you sell this guy a ticket to your all-you-can-eat buffet and he eats the table, is he at fault, or are you?
A strange subplot of the American Airlines bankruptcy is the saga of its unlimited AAirpass, a special deal offered by the airline in 1981. The company sold passes for a lifetime of free and unlimited First Class travel with no limitations at a price of $250,000. An additional $150,000 permitted AAirpass customers to buy one “companion ticket” that would let one person—anyone— accompany them on any flight, anywhere, again, for life.
Apparently eschewing competent market research—and you wondered why this airline went belly up?—American assumed that the lifetime luxury travel passes would be bought by corporations for their high-flying employees. But no; the purchasers were almost all very rich people with a lot of time on their hands. As designed, American got a quick influx of cash, but at an unacceptable and strangely unanticipated cost: the AAirpasses placed the company at the mercy of few profligate travelers who exploited American’s carelessness to the edge of absurdity, thereby raising a fascinating ethical question: If someone lets you have the right to ruin them, is it ethical to do it? Continue reading
Travel blogger Margie Goldsmith has a provocative post about a nightmare flight she experienced on American Airlines. You can read it here. The plane had one problem after another, all of which were
How much about what's happening in that cockpit do we really want to know?
described in terrifying detail by the captain, who cheerily informed them that:
Goldsmith ends her story with this: “The next time I’m on a delayed flight and the Captain does not announce the reason for the hold-up, I think I’m going to be one happy passenger.”
Your Ethics Quiz for today poses this question:
“Is it more ethical for an airline pilot to detail all the problems an airplane is having in the interest of candor and full disclosure, or should he or she just deal with the problems and not increase passengers’ anxiety over matters that they neither understand nor can do anything about?” Continue reading
"Would you cut the comedy please? I'm trying to feel you up!"
A retired Air Force Lt. Colonel apparently was arrested at a TSA airport checkpoint after she refused to stop reciting the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights (“Searches and Seizures”) while she was being screened. You can read her account here.
I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon of the various commentators from both sides of the political spectrum who are leading condemnation of the incident. My interest is in the ethics of the encounter and its subsequent reporting, as I do not see this as an example of official abuse and suppression of rights.
I object to much of how the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA has handled airport screening policy since 2001, as I discussed in this post and elsewhere. I agree that the public should not meekly accept what it regards as unjustified intrusions on their privacy, dignity and health, and that complaining, petitioning the government, putting pressure on elected and appointed officials and leveling criticism in various forums is a necessary and reasonable response. Nevertheless, the episode described in the accounts of this arrest has been mischaracterized. It was a situation in which TSA agents were placed in an impossible situation for the purpose of generating third-party indignation. The woman engaging in the protest also targeted individuals who can only be called innocent parties, the TSA screeners. They have a job, they have procedures to follow, and they have to follow them. They also have a lousy job, having to brush up against the privates of strangers while being glared at or verbally abused.
My question, as with many protests, is, “What was the objective here?” To be as annoying as possible? To cause a scene? To let everyone in the vicinity know that the woman objected to the procedures? To come as close to interfering with the screening process as possible without justifying an arrest? To get her name in the papers? To delay her fellow passengers, most of whom just want to get through the vile process and make their flights?
Or to get arrested? Continue reading
Rep. Jeff Denham: Now we know.
First the airlines are unfairly pilloried in the media thanks to an ignorant serviceman’s YouTube complaint about being charged excessive baggage fees for his gear….despite the fact that 1) the airlines already give servicemen discounts on extra bags (though they shouldn’t) and 2) the fees charged will be reimbursed, just like my business travel costs are reimbursed by the people who hire me.
Now Congressman Jeff Denham (R-CA) has introduced a non-binding resolution in the House that threatens to use contracts between the military and commercial airlines to punish carriers that do not waive all baggage fees for deployed military personnel.
Rep. Denham’s resolution has its good side: now we know that he is unethical, a fool beyond redemption, and a bully as well. Continue reading
“All posts that belong to the Dark Side are going to feature some ideas that might be a little evil or at least require some flexible ethics. Some things will be downright horrible, and you should not do them, but are either for your information or simply for the point of interest (and will be noted as such). Your judgment and actions are your own, so think before you do anything you read here and only use your dark side for good.”
—Adam Dachis, ethics corrupter, in the “Dark Side Disclaimer” that accompanies his column on the website Lifehacker, called “Secrets from the Dark Side.”
His current “Secrets from the Dark Side” column is entitled “How to Lie, Cheat, and Steal Your Way to a Perfect Flight,” which is an accurate description of its contents. Some of Dachis’s “tips” (scams? cheats?) are interesting, some are humorous, and all (well, maybe with one exception) are unethical. Dachis, for his part, doesn’t have the guts to advocate outright the conduct that he is explicitly promoting, nor does he condemn it. As his ethically incoherent ( “Only use your dark side for good”) disclaimer demonstrates, he thinks ethics is a game of some sort, and that being a “little evil” is cute, or trivial, or something.
A true ethics corrupter, Dachis wants to avoid personal accountability for the unethical acts of his readers spurred entirely by his post, while at the same time getting credit for his cleverness. This is the Richard Nixon approach to ethical corruption, planting seeds and disclaiming responsibility for the crop, telling followers, “We could do that, but it would be wrong.” Wink, wink.
Yechhh.
At least I'm finally home.
Last month I posted a list of the Top Ten Thought Fallacies That Undermine Our Ethics. This week, I really, really wanted to use one of them. But integrity beckoned. Damn integrity.
I just returned from a week-long speaking trip that took me to Palm Springs and Maui, and involved a total of about 38 hours travel time for a total of 3 hours of actual lecturing and instruction. It would have been about eight hours less and not have required me to be awake for 50 hours (and counting) straight if I had not managed to miss my flight to L.A. out of the Maui airport. Somehow, I got it in my mind that the flight was at 3:30 PM, when it was really at 12:30 PM. I had managed to check the time on the wrong page of my itinerary, and then never looked at my boarding pass. Only dumb luck got me the last seat on the last flight out of Maui on Sunday night. Continue reading
A site called Neatorama polled various ethicists, travelers and air flight experts regarding who should get the armrests when all three seats in a row in coach are occupied.
Actually, the graphic accompanying the column suggests that it also discusses two other flyingetiquette issues as well: do you recline your seat, and if you have a window seat and need to use the rest room when the other two passengers are asleep, what do you do?
Ah, air travel. Such a pleasure.
I can’t find any answers to those in the column, though, and that’s fine I know them already: Continue reading
How did I get HERE??
I confess: I honestly don’t understand this problem. From the first time I had an expense account, it never occurred to me to use it for my own pleasure. If I had to eat out on the road, I picked an inexpensive restaurant. I didn’t charge hotel room movies to my employer—he wasn’t sending me there to be entertained. I flew coach, and paid for any personal long-distance calls. Why? Because it wasn’t my money. I was a fundraiser for a non-profit, and I knew that whatever the donors were giving money for, it wasn’t for me.
It became apparent over the years that few of my colleagues or bosses saw it that way, when it came to their own expenses, and that elected officials and corporate officers not only readily use other people’s money extravagantly, but also that few people object when they do. The conduct is clearly irresponsible and unfair; I would call it dishonest. But those in high positions seem to regard it as their right. Continue reading
We should be ashamed of ourselves.
I have complained, more than once, about the naked greed and obvious incompetence displayed by the airlines charging $25 or more to passengers who check luggage. The results of this reverse incentive are that people carry on too many, and too large bags, boarding takes longer, and flights are delayed. Passengers talk about the idiocy of the policy all the time. So do the airline attendants. Anyone can see how dumb the policy is. The smart approach would be to charge for anything carried on other than a handbag or briefcase, and make checked luggage free. Boarding would be faster and there wouldn’t be passengers using the sneaky (but effective!) trick of carrying a piece of luggage through security only to check it at the gate at no charge when the airline personnel makes the routine plea for passengers to free up luggage bin space by doing so. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 