• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, April 14, 2008

As Kafka taught us, a quick death is better than a slow bureaucracy. Take the current airline situation. I would have thought American Airlines' reputation for safety--not the best among its peers--would take a hit from its present imbroglio involving old MD-80 planes.

So what's more important, the airline that gets you there alive or the one that gets you there on time? Market analyst Robert Passikoff, with whom I chatted last week, said that, in the list of things affecting consumers' feelings for an airline, safety is actually not concern number one. Timeliness and customer service are more important. Especially timeliness. Why? Because consumers take it for granted that airlines--U.S. airlines--are safe, that competence of personnel and working equipment are a price of entry. I mean, this isn't (Blank)stan Airways we're talking about.

But he does add that because of Expedia, Travelocity and the like, there are a lot of choices and perception of safety can burble to the surface. I know this. If I'm taking a trip to, say, Detroit (which by itself raises safety issues), and I can go real cheap by airline A--I'm not naming names, let's just call it "Air God Willing"--or airline B, I will confess that I have always chosen airline B, whose ticket price was actually more.

Why? Because I've done that trip many times on airline B, and I'm here to write about it. And also because of a completely irrational suspicion that maybe airline A isn't as safe as B, even if it's simple atavistic fear: the paint scheme of the planes. The airline's name, the fact that I haven't seen any advertising. "I mean," I mutter to myself, "if they can't even afford a national ad campaign how can they afford to fill the wing tanks?"

To pursue this line, I decided to talk to an expert on air travel. My father. He's an expert because he has flown to and within more countries on more planes than anyone I know. He recounts here his experience trying to find his 10-hour flight across the former Soviet Union from Moscow to Nakhodka, the far east, across eight time zones. On Aeroflot, which used to be the biggest airline fleet on Earth.

"I had a reservation, but it meant nothing. It meant that sometime that week you would be able to fly where you were going," he says. "I got to the Moscow International Airport. I go up to the line that says 'to Nakhodka.' The line is as long as half a football field. At the front of the line is a ticket desk. At the desk is a guy, and he's asleep, head on his hand. So, I'm standing there and nothing, nothing is happening. And," he adds, "every line to every flight to every city was just like that: people standing there, motionless, and a guy at the desk, doing absolutely nothing."

This was the line for domestic flights, for hapless nationals who would show up, prepared to wait a week to get on their flight. "They would just throw the Russians off and put the foreigners on," he says. "Anyway, I got out of the line and walked, and everywhere, people were lying on the benches asleep. Everyone was sleeping, under the stairs they were sleeping, on line to the toilet--which was horrible, awful--they were sleeping.

"I was ready to cry. I finally see this lady in uniform, and I just said 'gdeh' which means 'where.' She says, 'Oh,' and takes me to this door, and we are now going downstairs to the international waiting area. We got to the right place, but they had cancelled the flight.

"Why? They had gotten a lot of Japanese people whose flight had also been cancelled, so they put them on ours and rolled out another plane," he says, explaining that, on the airfield the Soviet authorities had something like an airplane parking lot where, if one plane got filled, they rolled out another one. "They had all these planes parked at edge of the field, just sitting there like cabs--so they bring another plane, put us all on it, and off we go."

How was the baggage service? "You got off the plane, and baggage claim was a big pile of suitcases. Literally all thrown in a big pile. You had to dig through it."

And how was the flight itself? "Who cares?" my father says. "We made it."