Michael Janke

Was there ever a golden age of flying?

We see images and stories of 1950’s and 1960’s passengers dressed up, sitting around in lounges and being served gourmet dinners. But flying then was expensive and the apparent luxury was mitigated by the half or more of the people in the airplane that were smoking. Good food, good drinks and toxic air.

Doesn’t sound like a golden age to me.

Airlines were eventually forced to separate smokers from non-smokers. That didn’t make a whole lot of difference to non-smokers who happened to be seated near the smoking section. Or seated anywhere else in the plane.

My first overseas flight in 1992 was with Lufthansa. At the time the international airlines did a fairly decent job of feeding you and seating was reasonable, but smoking was still permitted. As soon as the no smoking light went out the cabin filled up with a cloud up tobacco smoke. Brutal.

Other flights were in ratty old DC-10/11’s and sardine packed 747s. Cramped seating and tobacco smoke. Beyond brutal.

Smoking was banned on international flights in 2000, and airlines had not yet started trashing the rest of their services, so perhaps there was a brief  window where flying was halfway decent and smoke free. It couldn’t have been great though, or I’d remember.

And then 9/11 happened and air travel really took a shit. Long lines, convoluted security requirements, invasive searches, all because a group of Saudi Arabian funded terrorists decided to piss us off by crashing airliners into buildings. (Note that they were funded by Saudi Arabians. Not Iraqis. Not Iranians. Someone needs to dig up Cheney and tell him that he screwed up.)

Since then airlines have done everything they possibly could to cram more people into fewer airplanes and cut back on services to the point where flying any economy class is a miserable experience, and anything other than economy class is expensive.

So today we are smoke-free – we don’t have to breathe toxic waste from the people in the seats next to us, but we no longer have reasonably decent seating and tolerable food, and are saddled with a bunch of security hoops just to get into the airplane.

Flying sucks.

Of course if you double the price of your ticket you can bump up from what airline employees call ‘cattle class’ and get a seat with a couple inches more legroom. But you still have to pay extra for anything other than hardtack and water, you pay extra for checked bags, you have long lines for check-in and strict requirements for carry-ons.

Definitely not a golden age.

I got started on this rant because we are in Hawaii now taking advantage of cheap accommodations, courtesy of a friend of ours.

Kaua‘i

Kaua‘i is a beautiful island. Where we’re staying we can sit out on a lawn chair, watch birds and see an occasional whale.

While the natural parts of the island are beautiful the touristy parts are not so much. We are tourists staying in the touristy part. The fact that we’re here means we’re not helping the beautiful part of the island stay beautiful.

I’m not sure if we’re helping the local economy or not. I am sure that we’re helping drive up the price of housing and food on the island – a single bedroom apartment in the not very luxurious resort we’re staying at retails for over three-quarter million dollars, and an empty lot almost anywhere on the island costs of half a million. Food is at least double what it would be on the mainland. We’re averaging $100 per grocery bag of reasonably decent fresh food. I have no idea how locals working in the service industries on the island manage.

The weather is nice here. The storms and floods that are making the news are limited to the islands east of us.

Birds

We’re doing a bit of bird watching. Hawaii has some species unique to the islands and a few imports. About half of the species that we saw are non-native imports.

We aalso saw Red-Footed Boobys, Western Cattle-Egrets, Hawaiian Geese, Hawaiian Ducks, Red-crested Cardinals, Common Myrnas, Warbling White-eyes, Great Frigate birds, White-tailed Tropicbirds, Chestnut Munias, Hawaiian Gallinules, Hawaiian Coots, Western Meadowlarks, Black-crowned Night Heron, Laughing Gulls, Wedge-tailed Shearwaters, Spotted and Zebra Doves.

We were on Kaua‘i 15 years ago. I took a lot more pictures on that trip. Here’s a few:

Conclusion

WordPress’s AI assistant says my post sucks because it has no conclusion. So here’s the conclusion:

• Flying will get worse before it gets better.
• Kaua‘i has too many tourists. Us included.
• Artificial Intelligence is neither.