Patrick Smith writes a fantastic column on Salon.com called Ask the Pilot. He’s a commercial airline pilot and he answers people’s questions about the technical aspects of aviation and discusses the weird airline world from the inside out. His latest column, Getting the Silent Treatment from Airlines, is fascinating. This is the gist of the story (in case you get lost in Salon’s baroque login procedure like I did):

It’s ironic that while travel by plane remains profoundly safe, the airlines themselves are the subject of widespread and growing distrust. The mass media does them no favors by distorting and overhyping minor events, but the industry has, for many years, been guilty of aiding and abetting people’s fears through a combination of tight-lipped reticence and the use of ludicrous simplifications.

I’m a pilot, although I don’t fly anything bigger than a Cirrus SR-22. But this resonates with me. I often take nervous flyers as passengers and spend the time to explain what I’m doing to them.

From a business perspective, this article touches on the importance of two things:

• The customer experience which is made up of a thousand small interactions from the airline website to the check-in desk. And not so small: “extremely loud bangs and, occasionally, tongues of flame” resulting from a compressor stall. I recently wrote an article for Director magazine about this and I’ll post extracts once it appears in May.
• Clear, honest communications, for example an announcement from the cockpit in plain language explaining what has happened and reassuring everyone that they are safe - that compressor stalls are spectacular but very rarely dangerous, for example. When one passenger wrote to the airline asking for an explanation of what had happened they got a $100 voucher but no explanation. Another missed opportunity.

With so much competition, building a trust relationship with customers can be a genuine competitive advantage. For example, at the moment Amazon are royally pissing me off because they can’t give me a straight story about when I might get my Xbox 360. I ordered it at the beginning of November and they keep changing the due date. It is now 30th March. I mind the delay but I mind misleading, incorrect information more.