Air travel these days, economy class air travel in particular, is an exercise in ritual humiliation. The seats are so cramped that after being immobilized on a transatlantic flight for seven or more hours you almost need to be assisted to stand upright — the ways those astronauts recently were whose return to Earth had been delayed for months.
I realize that I bear some responsibility for my predicament. Call me old-fashioned, guileless or just plain cheap but when Kayak comes up with an airfare I refuse to accept the fact that it’s just clickbait and that the real fare is significantly higher if you’re traveling with anything more than a toothbrush and want to check a suitcase or even schlep aboard a carry-on bag. And if you want to choose your seat that’s more expensive still.
On a recent flight to Europe I received a notice from the airline approximately twenty-four hours prior to departure explaining that the flight would likely be full and offering my wife and me the opportunity to check our bags for free. (By the way, what’s with these jam-packed flights? Not too long ago planes routinely flew with empty seats and with any luck you might have two seats to yourself. Not anymore. In the last several months I’ll flown from Salt Lake City to Denver, Zurich to Bucharest, and Paris to Montreal — not exactly glamour destinations — without a seat to spare.)
Taking the airline at their word we proceeded to the check-in counter upon arrival at JFK. The ticket agent weighed our bags and informed us that we’d have to pay extra despite their kindly free bag offer. In that case, I said, we’ll keep our bags which met the size requirements for overhead luggage. Fine, she responded, but we might be stopped and have to check them in any case. It turns out that she was prophetic because she called ahead and told her colleague at the gate to stop us. He declined but the ticket agent’s campaign of retribution wasn’t over. A flight attendant combed the aisles until he finally found us — the airline had been trying to call me but like a good boy I’d already switched my phone to airplane mode and stored it — to recheck our credentials.
We suffered no further humiliation until our flight home from Paris a couple of weeks later. Since we had the cheapo fare we were at the mercy of the airline when it came to seat selection. But when I checked in online and saw the middle seats the airline had reserved for us — I’m not paranoid enough to believe that that demonically possessed check-in clerk was still on the warpath but rather blamed it on an insensate algorithm, albeit one programmed for cruelty — I finally bit the bullet and decided to spring for a window seat for myself and the adjoining middle seat for my long-suffering spouse.
So it was with some consternation when we marched down the aisle to our seats to discover that my window seat was actually a wall. The row in front of us had windows, as well as the one behind us, but I was staring at nothing but claustrophobic panel. I’m a bit of a prima donna when it comes to securing window seats. Or if you prefer to put a more charitable spin on my behavior, into my eighth decade I remain possessed by a childlike sense of wonder about the world.
I still find it hard to believe that machine-powered flight is a real thing. I suspect that the reason people suffer from a fear of flying, even though it’s infinitely safer than getting behind the wheel of your car, is because it doesn’t seem as if it ought to be possible. Like Wily Coyote who confidently walks off a cliff and through thin air until he realizes that the laws of gravity forbid such hubris and he plummets to the canyon floor far below creating a sizable impact crater, it makes no logical sense that a contraption weighing tens of thousands of pounds — and that’s even before you include me and all the other baggage — can get off the ground let alone fly vast distances above the clouds.
Yet because it can I want to take full opportunity and gaze upon this glorious planet from above. As far as I’m concerned passengers who pull down their shades for the duration of the journey — such as the woman in front of me so that I couldn’t peer out her window since I had none of my own — ought to be prosecuted for crimes against both nature and humanity.
I didn’t waste any time contacting the airline to share my outrage when I found myself facing that wall. I did so before the plane even became airborne. As I wrote them from my seat, the subject line reading “Seat misrepresentation,” “Unless you can show me a disclaimer when I purchased the ticket that my window seat was not actually a window seat [my boarding pass clearly stated “Window” not “Wall”] I would like a refund.”
When I landed almost eight hours later the airline had responded, saying that my request for a refund — not for the full transcontinental fare, though that would have been nice, but on the seat selection surcharge — was under review while offering me a ten percent promo code on my next flight with them. However, there were so many caveats as to make the offer almost meaningless.
A few days later they contacted me again to report that the seat surcharge would be credited to my payment card. If there’s a moral to this story — besides the fact that the responding customer service agent must have recognized that a wall is not a window no matter how you spin it — it’s that I need to spring for the extra bucks on my next flight, so that I can travel in something that doesn’t qualify as torture under the Geneva Convention.
Will I? Perhaps. Especially if I can do so with frequent flyer points.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
