When An Airline Becomes a Person: Beyond Turbulence & Travel Stories

I fly quite a bit. 50,000 miles in the past one and a half months. Lots of terminals and staring at departure and arrival screens.

And I have a quirk.

I hate turbulence. It frightens me. It makes me uneasy. It is one of the reasons I cannot sleep on planes. The logical centers of my brain tell me that the plane cannot fall out of the air because of turbulence. Physics tell us that the extraordinary amount of lift generated by the wings sailing through the skies at over 600 mph mean that the plane is basically pinned to the sky.

Except when it isn’t.

So, I am on American Airlines Flight 66, an Iberia codeshare to Barcelona, and I am riveted to my seat and sitting straight up, leaning a little forward, kind of in a panic.

The plane is literally rocking and rolling its way past Newfoundland and up towards Iceland, and I cannot move. I hate this feeling! I hate it. Any moment now, my irrational, reptilian brain informs me, this plane is going to flip over and plummet 33,000 feet and leave us sprawled against the Atlantic Ocean like smooshed sea cucumbers.

How Did I Get Here? My Emotions Were Already Primed

Two days ago, I was standing in Terminal 8 of JFK, speaking on my phone to my father. I was trying to figure out, “Where do I go to check in for my flight?”

There were no signs that indicated which flight was which, or where I should queue up to get my boarding pass. Not even on the little digital displays above the ticketing counters. There was one woman facing down a sea of a hoarding mass of people, who were trying to funnel into the one velvet rope line. It was like looking at the scene outside of Tenjeune in New York on a Friday night.

I waited in line, oblivious to what else I should do, until my turn came to speak to the woman gatekeeping the teeming mob. I felt like I was in a riot scene in a Thomas Hardy novel. And what did she say when I inquired about which section of the line I should stand in? She said this was the re-booking line, that the line for check in was automated and it was to my left.

Now I’m a stress ball.  And who wants to get on a flight, which might have turbulence, if one is a fried out stressball?

We talk about how people know nothing about the real emotional reasons they hire a product or a service for their lives. They are using them to get a job done in their lives, and they may not even know what it is they are trying to do. By telling these stories, we find out that products and services are not often what we say they are, and they change over time. To me, they are always like relationships, and they require relationships — long-term or temporary — to sustain our hiring of them.

Without stories, and people to listen to them. Or, people to tell them. We are lost. We are just data. We are numbers. We are nothing. I think as humans, we want to know. We want to know a lot, but we are not often given much to know. I think that if there is a role for marketing, advertising, and customer service it is to help people know these stories. When people open up to us, it changes our experience of anything.

That’s what happened on this flight. I felt safe. That’s what I felt. It was not that I had greater leg room. Or, that I had more pitch in my seat. Or that this movie was playing or that I had this kind of food for breakfast the next morning.

Speaking of the next morning.

It’s six a.m. and I descended with 230 other people into Barcelona. We moved south by southwest down the coast and Barcelona is lit up like coal on fire. It’s a quiet town, but throbbing with the early morning traffic of people heading to work. Although, they are not really heading just to work. They are stopping to take a coffee and chat in the window seats on the Carrere de Balmes. They are walking their little white Highland Terrier. Robin hands me something to eat and she pats my shoulder again. I’m feeling a little droopy.

“Just so you know, it was really bumpy back there,” she says, tilting her head to the rear of the plane. “I came by last night to check in on you. You were sleeping.” She smiles.  And when I walk into Barcelona for the first time, I am smiling, too.