Did you spend chunks of your Christmas vacation staring at the airport’s departure screen only to see your flight’s delay grow by the hour? Or perhaps you made it to your destination on time, but your luggage was 72 hours behind you?
Yesterday, pegged to the airlines’ troubled holiday season, the New York Times looked into its crystal ball and predicted that 2005 could be worse than 2004 for the cash-strapped airline industry. Toward its conclusion, the article waxes about the similarity of the airline industry’s downfall to that of other giant American industries such as coal and automobiles. The article then elaborates upon one glaring difference — while the decline of the coal and automobile industries was witnessed only in the isolated locales where the products were made, the airline industry’s downturn is being witnessed first-hand by Americans nationwide.
The Times tries to bring the problem to life via the plight of Evansville, Indiana:
In places like Evansville, Ind., the industry’s problems have meant the loss of entire airlines. On Dec. 17, US Airways dropped its daily flights to Charlotte, the airport’s only service to the East Coast. Now, passengers headed east must fly on other airlines to Detroit, Memphis or Atlanta, and connect from there.
There’s no doubt that the travel options have decreased because of US Airways’ departure. But the Times makes the Evansville air travel situation seem worse than it is by leaving out a few pieces of relevant information.
For one, while Evansville lost US Airways service on December 17, ATA announced (PDF) service to the city only four days earlier.
The Times tells us that to fly to the East Coast from Evansville passengers must connect through Detroit (about 364 miles to the northeast), Memphis (about 247 miles to the southwest), or Atlanta (about 350 miles to the southeast, according to USA Today‘s online mileage calculator). Those places are either far away or, in Memphis’ case, in the wrong direction. But other options do exist. ATA now offers flights to New York City via Indianapolis (135 miles northeast) and even before ATA’s arrival travelers could connect to many East Coast destinations via Delta’s hub in Cincinnati (170 miles northeast).
And it’s true that while there are no direct flights from Evansville to the East Coast, even when US Airways served the city travelers from Evansville still had to connect to get to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or any other major East Coast city.
True, this is just one section of a broader story. But it’s hard to take the rest of the article at face value when it appears that the Times can’t even figure out how to get out of Evansville.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.