An Open Letter to an Airline

I recently flew to and from Ixtapa with your airline, and I would like to bring a couple of things to your attention.

My itinerary clearly indicates that my flights there and back were to be "non-stop". Where I come from, "non-stop" means that you start moving when you leave, and you don't stop until you get to your destination. Hence, the term "non-stop" was coined. For anything else, one could use the terms "some stops", or "a lot of stops".

I sat on the tarmac in Vancouver for about an hour. My plane was tethered to a building. They re-fueled the jet, took on passengers and changed the entire crew. I fixed my gaze on a distant point and I am certain that my position, relative to that point, didn't change. Try as you might, you can't fool me. I was stopped. I was stopped for an hour.

The flight attendant tried to explain that we weren't actually "stopped" because we didn't actually get off the plane. Getting off the plane would, apparently, have been a "stop-over" which would, in turn, have indicated that we were "stopped". In fact, it would seem that we were simply inert, which is clearly different than being "stopped". I am somewhat concerned now about my driving habits. When I approach a "stop" sign, do I have to get out of my vehicle and re-enter before proceeding, or is it enough to become inert for a moment or two?

Now let's have a little chat about your route.

I live in Calgary, which is in the Mountain Time Zone. Ixtapa is in the Central Time Zone. Vancouver is in the Pacific Time Zone. In case you don't have a map handy, the Mountain Time Zone is smack-dab in the middle of the other two.

Why, then, would you start in Calgary, then fly 800 kilometers west to pick up passengers before flying 1600 kilometers east (and a whole bunch of kilometers south) to get to a Central Time Zone destination? I'm not sure what kind of mileage an Airbus 310 gets, but it can't be that great. This has to be costing you a ton of money.

Even if you had to get the equipment back to Calgary for the next run, wouldn't it make more sense, since the mileage would be no different, to fly it back empty, at the end of the day, and not subject your Calgary passengers to an extra 2 hours of flight time?

Like most airlines, I don't think you actually care much about your passengers. Airlines offer tons of promises about timeliness and efficiency when it comes to their freight operations. They hone their schedules so that they can guarantee overnight delivery from anywhere on the planet to anywhere else on the planet. It took you 8 hours to move me 2500 miles, which is only about 1/10 of the way around the world.

Next time, I'm flying freight.