I’d Rather Fly Economy on a Japanese Airline Than Business on a U.S. Airline

(日本語版あり）

Despite my affliction with Airplane Incidents Obsession Syndrome, I enjoy traveling by air.  I’ve flown domestically and internationally, in business and in economy, and on U.S. and foreign airlines.  What I’ve discovered through all that flying is that U.S. airlines are unbearably, unbelievably awful.

In fact, I’d rather fly 14 hours on economy class from New York to Tokyo on a Japanese airline than fly 15 minutes on business class from Boston to New York on a U.S. airline.  They’re that bad.

I once flew on an U.S. airline on business class in a trans-pacific flight on a business trip.  The experience started inauspiciously when a flight attendant came around to indicate, not too apologetically, that she was unable to serve champagne as pre-takeoff drinks because they had run out of it.  It was a complete mystery to me how they could run out of something before anything was served.

After the plane took off, I decided to take advantage of the extra leg room. I looked for the controls to the seat by looking to the right, where I found a lever.  A warning sign went off in my mind because I was expecting a button to push, but I didn’t think too much of it and pulled on the lever thing.  Nothing happened.  I tried pulling longer.  Still nothing.

At this point, I blamed myself:  I must have been doing something wrong. Perhaps these were not the right controls?  So I tried looking to the left, then down, then up, then back, before returning to the right with confidence that the levers I’d been fiddling with are the only controls.

So my blame turned to the airplane and the levers that looked like they were from the 1950s.  I’d initially dismissed the possibility, but since nothing else had worked, I tried simultaneously pulling on the lever and pushing back on the seat a la economy class.  And to my dismay, but not my surprise, the seat moved.

It turns out there’s a lot of work involved with performing economy class maneuver on business class seats.  It’s one thing to just push back on the seat while pulling on the lever; it takes advanced gymnastics to pull up the bottom of the seat while doing the same.  That a seat can be designed like this is so preposterous that, to this day, no one believes me when I recount this story about an analog business class seat on a U.S. airline.

On that flight, I eventually won the battle with the seat and took a nap.  By the time I woke up a couple hours later, I was starved from all the work I did with the seat so I called a flight attendant and asked for a mid-flight meal.  I was expecting some kind of a selection because it was business class.  Instead, the flight attendant told me she can bring cup noodles if I was interested.

I told her that I was, even as another warning sign went off in my head because only a year prior, I had flown economy class on the same leg during which I was also served cup noodles.  And lo and behold, the flight attendant brought me white Udon noodles that looked quite familiar.

So to summarize this business class experience:  there was no alcohol, just seats I had to sweat over and food from economy class.  You can see why I vowed never to fly business class on a U.S. airline ever again.

What’s frightening is that it can get worse.  Much worse.  In economy class.

I once took a coast-to-coast domestic flight seated at the back of the plane.  This was back in the day when airlines still served food on these legs on the off chance that passengers may get hungry during a six hour flight.

By the time the flight attendant came around to me on this particular flight, I was fully prepared for the moment.  She asked whether I wanted chicken or beef, so I answered beef.  She then dumped a tray on my table, which I stared at.  What I saw was chicken.  No explanations or apologies.  Just dry chicken.

Looking back, I should’ve just been thankful that I received a meal.  There was another flight that I took a couple years later in which I dozed off during meal service.  I woke up to find everyone eating, so I called a flight attendant and asked for the meal that I had missed.  I waited, and waited and waited, and nothing came.  I eventually got up to go to the bathroom, only to see a group of flight attendants chatting away in the galley, one munching on an apple as I starved to death in the back.

It’s infuriating experiences like this that has made me commit to never again flying U.S. carriers, whose motto appears to be, if we persevere with continuously lowering the quality of service, customers will eventually capitulate.

Let me make this declaration and take a stand:  I for one will not.