So Straighten Up and Fly Right in Y2K

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 3, 2000 | by Jamie Dettmer

For months now, the crescendo of Y2K alarm has been building. The media have had a field day -- including this magazine, though, of course, we have been far more responsible in our coverage than any others. For months an army of Y2K experts has been pontificating during slow-moving political news weeks on C-SPAN. Their message? The end of the world is nigh. Possibly no bad thing considering the hash mankind has made of this globe -- and now NASA is talking about sending people to Mars to screw up that planet!

The effect of all the Y2K chatter has been to undermine the urge to celebrate the turn into the year 2000. Widespread fear is leading many to decide that the safest place to be on New Year's Eve and on the first day of the next year is at home, and well away from any appliances or transport systems dependent on computers.

Being a fully paid-up curmudgeon -- in fact, some have insisted that I must have founded the club along with Scrooge -- that has been my attitude throughout my adult years toward New Year's Eve generally. Celebrate? No way. In the past I have stayed away from festive humanity as best I could, agreeing with the British literary giant Samuel Johnson that there is nothing more miserable than to see people endeavoring to have a fun time. "Auld Lang Syne"? Forget it. Some slights are just not worth forgiving -- as the dramatist John Osborne remarked, "What's wrong with good old-fashioned hate?"

But this year it is going to be different. I'm a reformed man and determined to whoop it up. Yup, I'm planning to celebrate, to drink and be merry -- and in the most dangerous of ways: in the bright blue yonder aboard a jet plane. I am fully confident that my government will straighten up and keep us flying right.

The general reaction of colleagues here to my Jan. 1 plan has been shock. There have been comments such as, "Are you nuts?" and "That's foolhardy." Although, sadly, it is worth noting that one or two appeared a touch delighted. Already, associate editor Doug Burton is eyeing my office, and managing editor Paul Rodriguez was spotted the other day brushing down some old blueprints detailing how the walls separating the grand expanse of his office from my bunker could be demolished to give him a croquet lawn.

You naysayers be warned: I'll be back, and with the last laugh. Why all of a sudden alter the habit of a life-time to mix with celebratory fellows and party? Because it allows me just for once to put something over on the airlines -- in short, to receive value for my money. Call your local travel agent and ask them for the airfares, either international or domestic, for New Year's Eve and Jan. 1. Be amazed. Admittedly, January is always a low-fare season but no one has seen prices like these since Charles Lindbergh and the turboprop.

The airlines are desperate -- they're almost paying you to travel. Four hundred dollars and you can fly round-trip to Moscow. London, Paris and any major city in Western Europe can be reached for the mid-$300s and even lower. And the prices are going to plunge further -- don't book them yet.

This magazine's travel agent, Oshila at the inimitable Passport Executive agency in Alexandria, Va., never has heard me so happy. I've taken to calling her recently just to ask her to quote fares to places I've no intention of traveling to, now or the future, merely to hear the prices, to savor them. Oh it is music to the ears -- a charming Mozart concerto, a fizzy Strauss waltz.

Each fare represents a loss to the airlines, something they thoroughly deserve for having ripped us all off for years with their shoddy service, lateness, frequent poor manners, insufferable cabin food and high prices. And that isn't even to mention their absurdly high charges for using inflight phones and their refusal to allow passengers to dial out on their own mobile phones, something that wouldn't, as the airlines spuriously claim, impair aircraft navigation equipment in any way.

For years the big airlines here and abroad collectively have amounted to a vast cartel. They are an ongoing organized conspiracy of fraud and theft that long ago should have been subjected to some Mafia-like prosecutions. Not a cartel? Well, pray, why are their fares almost always the same? How come Continental Airlines, for example, can reduce its fare to Bogota by about $30 at 1 p.m. only to have American Airlines cut by the same amount at 1:01. The airlines lower their fares together and raise them en masse. It defies logic to argue that they all buy gas at the same price, that their maintenance or labor costs are exactly the same. Think about it. They are headquartered in different cities, in different countries and have different labor contracts and enjoy different government subsidies -- but the idea that their costs and prices are the same doesn't fly. So think of me on Jan. 1 up in the sky above you. Oh, and one added bonus: Y2K fear will ensure me practically an empty plane -- I won't have to mix too much with humanity after all. The time of my flight? A few hours before midnight on Dec. 31 you wonder? Well, I'm not that nuts.