FEAR OF QUEUING

Mark Steyn says that, in spite of the latest

horror, Americans are not scared of flying. But they do hate lousy service and endless delays

New Hampshire ON the face of it, it seems statistically improbable. A waitress who escaped from the burning World Trade Center moments before the tower collapsed books a seat on American Airlines Flight 587 to San Domingo, and this time her luck doesn't hold. Two months after American Airlines lost two planes to a group of Islamakazi terrorists bent on turning them into flying bombs, they lose a third, which drops out of the sky on to a neighbourhood that lost 75 residents in the first disaster.

And yet there is, apparently, no connection, any more than there is between those two events and the dominant intervening story — the anthrax attacks on selected Washington and New York mailrooms, which, according to the official FBI profile, are most likely the work of an adult male, something of a loner, who chooses to confront his problems long-distance. Hmm. That could be Saddam. Or it could be me or any number of other crazy guys holed up in the hills. But, as things stand, it seems that in the last two months New York has suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack, an unprecedented biological attack and an unprecedented airline crash, all entirely unrelated but all contributing to what the media call the climate of fear.

If there is a climate of fear, it is largely confined to the TV networks and those who appear on them: politicians and celebrities — two groups so unnaturally sealed off from the world by their vast entourages that the sudden piercing of the perimeter by a few powdered envelopes has utterly confounded them. I once recounted in these pages the occasion when I had to accompany Whitney Houston across Sixth Avenue because she didn't feel comfortable crossing the street unescorted. It is unlikely that toppling buildings, lethal spores and planes dropping out of the sky will have made Whitney feel any more comfortable about the perils of Sixth Avenue. In this respect, was saddened to see another old friend, Liza Minnelli, pull out of a Los Angeles charity gala because her contacts in Washington had advised her not to fly. 'I should risk my life for one fucking song?' she asked, rhetorically. Liza, Liza: in Kabul, where until Tuesday music was banned, there were brave dissidents willing to risk their lives for one fucking song from the Liza at Carnegie Hall 2-CD set.

Contrast this behaviour with the folks at Rockaway Beach, just a few miles from Liza's midtown pad but another world. As soon as they saw the plane conic down, the residents grabbed fire extinguishers and hoses and rushed towards the blazing buildings. We are all firemen now; we all want to be not like Whitney or Liza but like Michael Moran, a Rockaway member of the FDNY who lost his brother, a battalion chief, on 11 September but stood on stage at the New York benefit concert and declared, -Osarna, you can kiss my royal Irish ass!' When Gray Davis, the governor of California, announced that the terrorists had plans to blow up major bridges in the state, the camera crews descended on the Golden Gate bridge to see if they could detect any downturn in traffic. 'Come and get me, Osama!' roared one motorist. Another said she had no plans to change her route but was planning to improve her odds by speeding even more than usual.

By contrast, the only real significance of Monday's air crash was that, even if it wasn't a bomb, it could have been. It reminds the already shrunken pool of airline passengers that, while the fellows at the metal detectors are now ostentatiously emptying out your undies over the conveyor belt and confiscating every nail-file and pair of tweezers, most of the checked baggage goes into the hold subject only to random and cursory examination. It thereby provides yet another reason not to get back on a plane, as if we needed one. Even before this week's mechanical failure, the industry was predicting a 27 per cent drop-off in next week's Thanksgiving traffic, usually the busiest travel period of the year. The 73 per cent who haven't cancelled are enjoying hastily introduced bargain fares which ensure that just about every flight is flying at a loss. Anxious to prevent any further slippage, the experts point out that flying is still the safest form of travel: if you fly every single day of your life, you would have to live 26,000 years to face the statistical likelihood of dying in a plane crash.

But that's missing the point. If you fly every single day of your life, by the end of the first week it already feels like 26,000 years. What the airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration and Norm Mineta, the wretched figure who serves as transportation secretary, don't seem to realise is that, as far as Mr and Mrs America are concerned, the issue isn't the fear of flying but the crappiness of flying. This was true well before Mohammad Atta booked his first pilot's lesson. Domestic air travel has long been the exception that proves the rule about American service: in a British restaurant or store, I pine for American waitresses and sales clerks, but on United or US Air or Delta or Continental I dream fondly of the smart, solicitous cabin crews of Virgin or British Airways.

Still, even with the world's surliest trolley dollies in their worn, shiny, shapeless navy stretch pants — okay, let's not be sexist here: if you want to see America's worstdressed gay men, take a plane — and even with their minimal standards of cabin service (a bag of mini-pretzels) and the delays on landing and take-off, pre-9/11 you could at least turn up ten minutes before the flight and, thanks to the desultory security, know you'd get on the plane.

September 11 was a catastrophe for the industry, but also an opportunity. They seized it, and got a $40 billion emergency bail-out from the federal government. They needed the money even before that Tuesday morning; the only difference is that they wouldn't have got it. And what did they do with it? They laid off thousands of employees, so that, even without the new security procedures, the check-in lines have just got longer and longer. If you go to a supermarket at certain times of the day, you'll find that the deli counter can be quite busy, so you pull a little ticket from the dispenser and mooch around in the general area, loading up the yogurt and Pop-Tarts until your number's called. For 40 billion bucks, you'd think the airlines could buy a couple of dozen ticket dispensers apiece. But not a chance. They want you backed up in lines, shuffling your bags forward a couple of inches at a time, because your misery is their convenience.

In the wake of 11 September. the FAA has vastly increased the opportunities for commercial aviation to chastise its customers. The federal government has now ordered the airlines to restrict cabin baggage to two items — one carry-on bag and one personal item. There's no official government definition of 'personal item', but the Air Transport Association has decided that, if your bag contains essentials — wallet, medication, pen and notebook — it counts as a personal item, but if it's got non-essentials, such as lipstick, cufflinks and a handful of CDs you bought at Tower Records earlier that morning, it should he redesignated as carry-on. The point of this is to reduce the number of bags going through the screening machines, and thus increase the chance of the security guards spotting dangerous weapons like eyebrow pencils. On the other hand, it increases the number of bags that are checked in, and thus decreases even further the likelihood of anybody spotting anything dodgy going into the hold. And, either way, it overlooks the various reasons passengers take as much as they can into the cabin: for one thing, the compensation you get for items that are lost, damaged or stolen en route is a mere pittance; for another, if you're flying to New York for, say, a black-tie dinner that evening, you're taking a huge risk checking in your tux (as I know from experience). After 11 September, some flight attendants said they wouldn't feel safe until the government banned all hand luggage. Fine, but if you round up all the biz execs in America willing to check in their laptops and attache cases, you'll have enough to fill a couple of fourseater Piper Cubs.

Pre-9/11, the non-security procedures at American airports were doubly harmful: they deluded the average citizen into believing that the state was ensuring his safety, while letting the professional terrorist know he can get away with anything. Norm Mineta's strategy for the world post-9/11 is for more of the same: if you buy a plastic fireman's axe at Toys R Us for your favourite nephew, it will be confiscated as a dangerous weapon; if you're sitting at the gate reading a thriller with a cover showing an explosion, you will be prevented from boarding as a security risk, as happened to one young man recently; if you stand up on a flight within 30 minutes of Reagan National, your plane will be diverted to Dulles, as happened a couple of hours before Monday's big crash because a guy needed to use the bathroom. On the other hand, a fellow at New Orleans forgot he had a handgun in his briefcase and it sailed through the scanner undetected. On the plane, he suddenly remembered it and gave it to the stewardess, who promptly ensured that the poor law-abiding citizen was detained on arrival and harassed by law enforcement for what was, in fact, the airline's incompetence.

Now the Senate and the House of Representatives are split over whom to entrust with airport security: the House favours private firms (as at Heathrow and Tel Aviv), the Senate wants them federalised, so that instead of being minimum-wage incompetents who quit after four months, they'll be highly-paid incompetents you can never sack. The Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson has proposed what she believes is a bipartisan compromise, whereby big airports would be federalised but smaller ones would have private security. Under Senator Hutchinson's plan, if I flew from New Hampshire to Washington, I would not only have to have my bags examined at my local airport but again while changing planes at Boston.

Are these guys on the same planet? Senators will never have to endure any of these insane measures themselves — Hillary Clinton's impatient driver has already crashed one new security checkpoint — but the rest of the citizenry are assumed to he willing to get to the airport four hours early for a onehour domestic flight in the interests of security. It's true that air travel is now safer than it was before 11 September, but that's not due to Senator Hutchinson or Secretary Mineta so much as the splendid example of the passengers on Flight 93, who charged their hijackers and crashed the plane in a Pennsylvania field. These days, if you're sitting next to a burly guy or a woman with severe PMS or even an 87-year-old arthritic granny, you can feel that they're itching for someone to start something, just so they can rush the punk and beat him to a pulp. An aroused citizenry is more use than all Mineta's bans on plastic knives and long fingernails.

But, in the end, even the prospect of kneeing Osarna's boys in their meticulously depilated goalies isn't enough. America is a big country, but an awful lot of travel is discretionary. Even business travel. Somehow, psychologically, we are stuck in the mid19th century when the original travelling salesmen spent 11 months of the year on the road because there was no alternative. The railroads have gone, the telephone's arrived, and so has video-conferencing, and electronic networking, but guys are still on the road, flying off to lunch in Houston and a presentation in Denver and all kinds of other engagements they don't really need to be physically present at. The FAA and the airlines have blithely assumed that they can triple the amount of time you have to allow for a flight to New York for a business lunch without companies calling into question the necessity of that lunch.

If next week's numbers are down by more than 20 per cent, that's the death knell for the airlines: if Americans won't fly for Thanksgiving, they won't tlyat all. And that's good news for oil prices, which have already fallen in part owing to the airlines' reduced need for jet fuel; and even better news for customers. The sooner the current lousy carriers go out of business, the sooner the FAA will be forced to change its ways, the sooner we'll get some

new companies that give serious thought to winning patrons back with decent food, perky stewardesses and efficient service. The American people aren't afraid of flying, but, if airlines aren't yet afraid of the American people, they ought to be.