by Zach Bigalke

Created on: January 04, 2007   Last Updated: April 17, 2007

There is something inherently wrong with the trends that have permeated the airline industry in recent years. Melanie and I just completed a cross-country tour from Portland to Minneapolis to Detroit to Pittsburgh over the New Year weekend, finishing our odyssey with a rental-car jaunt to the Pennsylvania burgh of Indiana for the wedding of one of Melanie's high-school chums. And while I have long been a fan of air travel, the courses that the industry has chosen to pursue are puzzling and, indeed, often shameful and inexcusable.

I believe that this whole trend of the cattle-car, herd-em-in-and-out, minimalist approach to the multi-billion-dollar industry of air travel was borne from two events. First, the birth of competitive, low-fare airlines such as Southwest and JetBlue have led many customers to lower their standards in what to expect when they purchase a plane ticket. Second, a plan by American Airlines in 1987 wherein, by removing one olive from each in-flight salad they saved $40,000 annually, have caused other airlines to slowly pare back services to a minimum.

The problem with this second trend is that, realizing the potential gain to be made, airlines followed American Airline's suit in cutting back on meal options. The trend went further when the bargain airlines decided not to offer frills such as a morsel to munch. Soon, all airlines were finding that, if one fewer olive on each salad could net tens of thousands, then NO SALAD would net TENS OF MILLIONS! It was then just a logical leap to think: If I don't give the rubes anything to eat on my flight, then I might just save HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS EACH YEAR!

Instead, they will even charge you for the privilege of eating on their flights. The Northwest flights taken over this past weekend offered trail mix or single-serving canisters of Pringles for two dollars a pop. Not content with gouging the customer of their money on airfare, they are now also taking advantage of hungry stomachs caught without time in the airport because of tight connecting-flight schedules by fleecing them at two-hundred-percent markup.

But even before we were able to board the plane, the security checkpoint reared the first ugly indication of events to come further down the line. As I set my various carry-on articles on the conveyor to get their gamma-ray treatment and incendiaries sweep, the guard peering over the entire operation barked at me to get my hands out of the X-ray machine. And, to think, I had just touched one of

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