Llewellyn King: U.S. airlines gouge and pack

WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A Conservative British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, coined the phrase “the unacceptable face of capitalism” in 1973. He was describing the actions of Roland Walter “Tiny” Rowland and the company he headed, Lonrho (London Rhodesia), a mining and real-estate conglomerate with interests across Africa.

Having had a hectic travel schedule since the end of the COVID-19 lockdown, I can say that the airlines have become an unacceptable face of capitalism.

I refer to the airlines collectively because from the traveling public’s point of view, they are a massive whole with little to choose between them. Nominally in competition, their attitude to the public has become a common one of disrespect.

That one of the airlines, Southwest, would implode when stressed was no surprise. A metamorphosis had taken place in the last two years with the passengers -- the customers – becoming, in the collective airline psyche, just economic opportunities, ripe for endless upselling.

When the airlines realized that they could extract money over and above the ticket price, they began a service free fall and abandoned any pretense of respect for their customers -- or, apparently, themselves. They, the customers, had become economic targets for exploitation.

First came the baggage charges. Surely, the airlines knew people didn’t travel without bags and could have allowed for that in ticket pricing.

Then they found they could upsell the seating, making passengers pay extra for marginally better seats, and even for boarding about five minutes early.

On a recent flight in a Boeing 767, the airline was charging a stiff premium to sit in the double seats near the window rather than in the three abreast in the middle. My wife and I stayed in the middle.

A new class of service called “basic economy” has prohibited carry-ons in the overhead bins, forcing passengers to pay for checked baggage and wiping out some of their flight-cost savings.

I have flown round the globe for decades and have known every class of service, from that on the Concorde to the wonders of first class on Asian air carriers. But mostly, I have sat in the back and watched as the aircraft have gotten older and shabbier, as the seating area has shrunken, as the lavatories have shrunken in number and size, as the snacks and food offering are as incomprehensible as they are inedible, and as the flexibility of tickets has disappeared.

In tandem with these deteriorations in comfort, service and pricing, has come cancellation of normal business practices when it comes to cash and credit cards. You can no longer buy a ticket with cash at the airport. You can’t use a credit card on board for a snack if you haven’t pre-registered your credit card and, in many cases, you must have your own device to watch entertainment.

For a fee, of course, you can now get Wi-Fi on many airlines. But the seats are so positioned that you can’t, in my experience, open a laptop and work. For another fee, they may have a fix.

As I have strapped myself into a sometimes-broken seat (which reclines about 2 inches), looking at the ashtray (which indicates the age of the cabin furnishings), I have begun to wonder to what extent this predatory approach to passengers, this total indifference to those who pay the stiff fares and all the fees on top, has filtered down to the maintenance department.

Passengers, I guess, are inured to the horrors of airline travel and the victimhood that goes with it. Know this: If you are trying to travel by air, you have identified yourself as an economic target for a group of companies, the airlines, which supposedly compete but which, within hours, match every new fee dreamed up by one of their supposed competitors.

The latest serious inequity is defrauding passengers by reducing the value of their frequent-flyer miles.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg needs to take a root-and-branch look at the airlines: the greed, the collusion and the manifest disrespect for the passengers that is pervasive. Importantly, he needs to look at seat size and aisle width and their impact on safety.

I have a full flying schedule ahead in January, and I am preparing for my time in the gouging skies with trepidation and resignation. 

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King: Using exaptation, including radiation, to treat COVID-19

X-ray treatment of tuberculosis in 1910

The good news is that if you get COVID-19, you stand a better chance of getting better sooner, without having a long, if any, stay in the ICU, and you may not have to suffer on a ventilator.

The bad news is there may be no silver bullet of a vaccine by the end of the year, and if one is approved, there may be a free-for-all among vaccine developers, countries, and special interests.

For the improvement in treatment outlook, thank a process called exaptation. The term has been appropriated from evolutionary biology and means essentially work with what you have, adapt and deploy. The most quoted example is how birds developed wings for warmth and found they could be used for flying.

One of the great exponents of exaptation, Omar Hatamleh, chief innovation officer, engineering, at NASA, says, “There is an abundance of intellectual property that can be repurposed or used in areas and functions outside of their original intended application.”

There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of medicines – generally referred to as “compounds” in the pharmaceutical world – that have been developed for specific purposes but which may be useful in some other disease, “off label” in the pharmacologists’ vernacular. An example of this off-label use is the steroid Dexamethasone. It has been found to reduce death among critically ill COVID-19 patients.

It is a good idea to look outside the box, as we are constantly advised. But it is also a good idea to look inside the box as well.

Inside every hospital, for example, is a radiation department. Radiation is a medical tool universally used in cancer treatments.

Now comes word that radiation can save lives and cut hospital stays for COVID-19 patients. James Conca, a Tri-Cities, Wash.- based nuclear scientist, explains to me, “This treatment is critical because severe cases cause cytokine release syndrome, also known as a cytokine storm, causing acute respiratory arrest syndrome, which is what kills.”

Dr. Mohammad Khan, associate professor of radiation oncology at Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, gave patients at the university’s Winship Cancer Institute a single, very low dose of radiation (about one hundredth of the dose given cancer patients) and they began to show almost immediate improvement. The radiation reduced the inflammation -- and in COVID-19, as in many other diseases, it is inflammation that kills.

The use of radiation in this way opens the door to the treatment of many diseases where inflammation is the killer.

The Emory experience fits with a burgeoning field of study where sophisticated physical and engineering techniques intersect with medicine.

Dr. James Welsh of Loyola University Medical Center, in Chicago, and a consortium of doctors and hospitals are hoping to launch nationwide clinical trials on the use of radiation in combating killer inflammation.

The sad thing, Conca says, is that the benefits of radiation in treating pulmonary disease, especially viral pneumonia, were known 70 years ago. In treating the pneumonia, he said, success rates were 80 percent, but the rise of antibiotics and antiviral drugs, combined with public concern about radiation, led to its being confined to the treatment of cancer.

Generally nuclear medicine tends to mean cancer treatment, but nuclear scientists have chafed at this.

While the outlook for therapies -- for things will save your life in hospital -- is bright, the outlook for a vaccine, so hoped for, is confused. Assuming that a vaccine is perfected, that it works on most people and across a range of mutations, the stage is set for chaotic distribution.

One man and his company, Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India, may hold the key to who gets the vaccine first. He has signed pacts with four vaccine hopefuls, including the one from Oxford University, considered by many to be the frontrunner.

Serum Institute is partnering with the British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca to manufacture and supply 1 billion doses of the Oxford vaccine in India and less-developed countries. AstraZeneca says it is working on equitable distribution. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said Britain should have first dibs on British-developed vaccines.

The World Health Organization is the only international organization that might be able to orchestrate distribution, and the United States is withdrawing from that body.

Science may be forging ahead – exaptation at work -- but human folly is as virulent a strain as ever.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

See whchronicle.com