Michael Lewis: Pity those who have to fly coach class

ROUND THE WORLD

Being a private person, I can't imagine flying any way but privately. It's true that I airdrop into Bloomberg every now and again to offer the public a rare glimpse of the mind of a seriously rich (over $100 million net worth) and consistently successful hedge-fund manager (more than $1 billion under management). But mainly I try to keep to myself, and to that end have long avoided boarding an airplane owned by someone else.

I can tell you how your travelling future looks to me from the window of my Gulfstream G5. And from where I sit I can see three big trends. They are:

Trend One: The service on your airplanes, bad as it may be, is going to get much worse.

AMR Corp.'s American Airlines is now charging $15 a bag, US Airways Group Inc. is taking away the in-flight movies and demanding two bucks for a can of Coke, and various airline chief executive officers are contemplating weighing the passengers and charging them by the pound. And you just know that once one of these airlines starts weighing people, all of them will, or risk being crushed by fat people looking for a deal.

"They have already begun to think exotically," a spokesman for the airline industry told Bloomberg News, apropos of these airline CEOs. "Nothing is not under the microscope."

There's a reason for this, and it's not just the price of oil. It's the price of you.

You still expect to be treated like a rich person when you have demonstrated, by flying commercial, that you are a poor person. (Poor being defined as an inability to afford at least a share of a NetJet.) And nothing demoralises a service-industry professional so quickly as the sight of a high concentration of poor people.

Take flight attendants, for example. Once upon a time these straight ladies and gay men sought to please fliers; now they treat fliers like criminals. Ask a stew and she'll probably blame it all on terrorism. She'll go on about how after 9/11 she stopped being a camp counsellor and became a cop. But that's just an excuse.

Little in Return
What's really happened is that she's come to realise that however happy she makes her passengers they can give her back only so much in return