By Adam Turteltaub
adam.turteltaub@corporatecompliance.org
First United Airlines was all over the headlines, and everyone was irate with them. Now we’ve had headline-grabbing, viral videos of incidents at Delta, American and most recently Spirit. It seems like we have an airline episode every week, if not daily.
What’s going on here? Obviously, there are some serious issues with public attitudes towards airlines. I agree with the many who have observed that shrinking legroom, complicated boarding schemes, and bag fees are all shortening passenger fuses.
But there are two additional issues here that are of particular note for the compliance and ethics professional.
First, once the public is made sensitive to an issue we suddenly see it everywhere. It’s like quinoa. You never heard of it a few years ago, you finally noticed it, and suddenly you can’t help but see it everywhere.
It’s the same thing with airline incidents, but kind of on steroids. The public is made aware; we’re all on the lookout, and we all gobble up more examples wherever we find them. And, of course, all that is helped by the ubiquity of camera phones chronicling the problem and social media sharing it with the world.
Second, we’re seeing in action the admonition: Never rejoice at a high-profile failure of a competitor. Instead, look to see how you’re managing the same risk before the same problem affects you. Many people at United’s competitors grinned when things when bad for United. It’s a mistake.
Instead, they and anyone in business should start asking tough internal questions: Do we have similar policies in place? Does standard operating procedure suddenly look dated? Who is responsible for preventing something similar from happening in your organization? Is he/she aware of the incident and increased public scrutiny?
So the next time you hear of a competitor having a compliance or other high-profile failure, don’t rejoice, point fingers or dismiss it as something that would never happen here. Instead, treat it like you treat the guy in front of you on the TSA line who forgets to take his phone out of his pocket before going through the metal detector. You can definitely shake your head, but be sure to double check your own pockets just in case.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Thanks United, Delta, American and Spirit” quote=”Thanks United, Delta, American and Spirit” theme=”style3″]
Fact is these incident types happen regularly particularly where there is intentional overbooking. Old news to the airlines and there is much more trouble ahead.
1. Led by Delta there is a trend to smaller seats to enable more seats to be jammed into some existing and all future commercial plane designs.
2. Increased compression of legroom coupled with monetizing the increasingly precious comfort seat spacing.
3. Again led by Delta, the narrowing of main aisles in newer planes making all two wheel luggage obsolete, forcing the use of newer smaller much more expensive four wheel luggage.
4. More combative and aggressive airline staff in order to protect themselves from the passengers who are increasingly responding with similar behavior.
5. The phrase “passenger hatred” was first used by a United employee several years ago before their merger. This hasn’t been a happy industry since before deregulation (mid 70’s)
6. The record will show that United had it’s best month ever just after the now famous “dragging off the plane” incident.
7. When there is no leverage, oversight or meaningful penalty, there is little reason to change . . . the passengers just keep coming.
More great truths! In our industry, we very occasionally shake our heads at others’ alleged misdeeds as we utter “tsk tsk,” but usually, we take a pretty good look in the mirror to make sure we aren’t in danger of a similar accusation. Take the pole out of your own eye before you tell the other guy to get the speck out of his. Or put the O2 mask on before helping others. These basic themes of humility get lost in today’s world of “How dare they” rioting and anti-social networking. Thanks for the reminder.
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