What's Right With U.S. Airlines?

CHARLOTTE, N.C. TheStreet) -- Last week a contributor to TheStreet wrote a column called "What's Wrong with U.S. Airlines?"

A key thesis in the column was that flight attendants on some U.S. airlines are neither sufficiently young nor sufficiently service-oriented. "Travel on a United(UAL) Airlines international route and you will find that almost all flight attendants are over 50 years old," he wrote. "Many are in their 60s and 70s."

Flight attendants aren't just servers -- at times they're critical to passenger safety. And they don't have to be young, just able to perform in emergencies.

By contrast, attendants on a flight operated by Japanese carrier ANA "were mostly in their 20s, a few in their 30s [and] they were beautifully dressed with identical dresses and hairstyles." Also, he said, they "acted as if they were on stage."

Does any of this disturb you? It seems to suggest that older people, particularly older women, ought not to have certain jobs. Fortunately, our laws and unions, which our contributor disparages, protect us from letting such thinking become corporate policy.

Our contributor also suggested that safety demonstrations at the beginning of a flight are intended as vehicles for flight attendants to assert themselves, that "unions have pushed the safety theme to move away from a customer service focus" and that "almost no one reading this will ever depend on a flight attendant for safety." And because commercial aviation in the U.S. is perhaps the safest form of transportation in history, that last point, at least, is true. But every once in a while, we absolutely need flight attendants for safety, which is why the Federal Aviation Administration requires their presence.

It might be useful to view the role of veteran flight attendants and their unions through the prism of a December 2008 incident involving Continental Flight 1404, a Boeing 737-500 that veered off the runway in Denver around 6 p.m., hit an embankment and burst into flames. (Continental has since merged with United.) Within 90 seconds, every passenger had been evacuated.

Much of the credit for that went to three veteran flight attendants, who left only after the passengers had all disembarked, even as fire on the side of the aircraft made many exits unusable, melted overhead bins and caused windows to melt and pop.

The three flight attendants were "real heroes," Richard Lowe, one of two pilots flying as passengers that day who also worked to evacuate passengers, told the National Transportation Safety Board. "The epitome of training in action was the flight attendants."

The crew included Pamela Howard, an 18-year flight attendant; Regina Ressler, with 11 years, and 10-year-veteran Al Felipe. Their union, the International Association of Machinists, honored them, but while we all know about the role senior pilots and flight attendants played when US Airways Flight 1949 landed on the Hudson River in 2009, few people outside the airline have ever heard of Flight 1404 -- perhaps because the incident occurred not in broad daylight in the world's media center, but rather late at night in Denver.