I don't know if it's accurate to say that the airlines ever cared about passengers. Before Deregulation, almost everything was regulated, especially the fares. The way airlines competed was with service. They competed by offering something different, and hopefully better. Keep in mind that U.S. carriers NEVER had the support of the government that the foreign carriers had. And we employees were very aware of this.
I can tell you this. In the late 1970's, when we knew that Deregulation was in our future, we airline employees would say that pretty soon flying would be like taking a Greyhound bus. We were right. Think about what flying is like today. It's even worse than taking a Greyhound bus. As for me, I've avoided flying as much as I can. This past August I flew for the very first time since 2007, and I'll confess that I booked a first class ticket, which turned out to exempt me from dealing with the TSA. Yay! And since I originally started long before any security bullshit, and I have zero respect for the TSA.
I honestly know nothing about Anderson, but I can tell you many stories about Nyrop. He'd take a flight and would invariably fire the flight attendants. He apparently couldn't get away with firing the ground agents in the same way. He was hated in ways that are hard to describe. In 1969 and 1970 I worked alongside the Northwest Airlines ticket counter at DCA, Washington National Airport. I learned first hand how completely hated Donald Nyrop was. I heard more than one story of what happened to his luggage. He'd check in, and the counter agent would check his suitcase correctly. But when the ramp agents saw his baggage -- and there were times, as I understood it, that the counter agents would inform them about the suitcase in question -- it would be sent somewhere else. Without ever touching the original baggage tag. As I heard it more than once from Northwest employees, there was some favored destination in Japan that his suitcase would be sent to. Eventually, Nyrop learned not to have a name tag with his own name on his suitcase.
Back then the ability to non-rev, meaning to fly more or less for free (service charges applied but unless you're a real airline geek the details aren't important) was hugely important. We worked a forty hour week. Fifty weeks a year. We NEVER got an extra day off for a holiday. Never Quite unlike most people. I need to repeat: We worked fifty weeks a year, forty hours a week, and often more. There were times when afternoon shift (which is what I always worked) called up morning shift at about 3 a.m. and asked them if they'd be willing to come in early so that we could finally go home. They always did. I never had extra time off for a holiday. Never. All holidays ever meant was more work. Do you want to hear about the Thanksgiving that I spent at the airport because going home and then coming back the next morning would have taken too much time, and so I ended my shift at about midnight on the day before Thanksgiving the evening flight to Elmira and Ithaca was cancelled, so I had to put up outbound passengers at a hotel, and the next day there would be two morning flights to those cities -- the one from the night before and the one that was regularly scheduled in the morning, and there I was, smiling at the passengers at 7 am on Thanksgiving Day after having smiled goodnight to them the night before at 10 pm.
Or the day,several years later, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, where crosswinds were so severe that National had been closed all day, and we all worked in our coats -- I learned I could type on the computer with my gloves on -- and a TWA flight crashed outside of Dulles because of the crosswinds. It was quite an amazing job, I'm here to tell you.
I learned to hate all holidays, because all they ever meant was extra work. And I never, ever, had an extra day off. Never.
One time I was waiting for a diverted flight, one that should have arrived at DCA but was diverted to Baltimore because of the jet curfew. I waited, and waited, and finally about 3 a.m. gave up and went home, feeling quite guilty that I'd left right before someone had finally shown up. The next day I learned that all the passengers due to arrive at DCA had all found alternate transportation to their final destination, and that no one ever came to the airport.
Or the time I got a phone call asking me to return to the airport because Baltimore was closed because of fog but the plane could land at DCA and could I please meet it and get the passengers take care of? I did. I returned to the airport a couple of hours after my shift ended, wrote up a bunch of taxi vouchers, and sent the passengers on their way. The only good thing here was that I got 4 hours of pay even though I was only there about three hours.
Do you want to hear about the time DCA was closed because of fog so bad that the local busses almost missed the exit -- I know because I rode the local busses at the time and my bus barely made the exit to the airport. Or the time we were shut down because of snow and, oh heck, who cares all these years later.
I can tell you that the rank and file employees of any airline face the brunt of everything, and the airlines themselves need to be held responsible for all of this.
I can tell you that I often say that nothing I have done since then, not even childbirth, has been half as difficult. And I'm not exaggerating, trust me on this.
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