I’m on my honeymoon in Playa del Carmen, Mexico right now, which is why I haven’t posted any updates in a while. If you’re interested, check out my honeymoon pictures on Flickr and I’ll be back in mid-March!

There’s an interesting article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about incivility in airports and commercial airlines.

“Abnormal, aberrant or abusive behavior in the context of the air-travel experience” is back with a vengeance, says Andrew Thomas, an assistant professor of business at the University of Akron, who has written books about air rage and aviation “insecurity” and maintains a Web site called airrage.org.

Mr. Thomas sees an entitlement mind-set in today’s flying public, especially among business travelers. “Nobody tells a lot of these guys ‘no,’ ” he says. “So when a flight attendant tells them to turn off the phone or the BlackBerry or that they can’t have another drink, they don’t know how to hear ‘no,’ ” he says.

That might be part of the problem, but I have my doubts that it’s the predominant one. I think a lot of people who end up being rude to flight attendants or other airline personnel are just regular people who have had the airline stick it to them just one too many times.

When things go wrong in other customer service experiences, most people don’t fly off the handle. Mistakes happen and nothing works perfectly, and if the service you are dealing with makes a sincere apology and does what they can to make it right, all is well. My Panasonic camera broke down a few months ago, and Panasonic made it so painless and easy to get a warranty repair that I’m still a happy customer. The wait staff at restaurants will occasionally forget your order, and when they apologize and make it right, no harm done.

The problem with the airlines is that they are set up to create a bad service. The various airlines set up all of their flights at the peak times, knowing full well that there isn’t enough runway space and there’s no way all of those flights are going to take off on time. This week, outgoing FAA Administrator Marion Blakey called on the airlines to fix their scheduling problems or risk government intervention. The airlines schedule flights knowing that the only way they can work is for everything to run perfectly, and no matter how efficient the airline is, there’s no way that can happen — airplanes can’t fly through thunderstorms and they can’t land on runways occupied by other aircraft. When they don’t build enough flexibility into aircraft and crew scheduling, it’s almost guaranteed that the entire day’s schedule is going to go to hell at the first sign of trouble (and, because of crew rest regulations, probably the subsequent days’ schedules as well).

Most of the other bad experiences of the airport can be dealt with by simply being completely prepared for them; don’t check any luggage, make sure your carry-on items follow all of the idiotic TSA guidelines about 3 ounces of toothpaste, take off your shoes before someone has to ask, and have your photo ID ready at each checkpoint. But even if you do everything right, you can’t do anything about the dumb setup of check-in points (why is it unclear which line I have to stand in, ever? Can’t US Airways afford to make a few signs?), and you can’t do anything when the airline sets up the schedule in a way that virtually ensures that last night’s crew will get in too late to fly this morning’s flight. It’s like the airlines aren’t even trying. When airline personnel apologize, their apologies sound shallow and rehearsed because they are — they make the exact same apology a million times a day, every day. “Sorry” doesn’t mean anything when we know full well that you’re not sorry at all — this is happening because it’s how the system is designed.

I’m all for capitalism, and I want the airlines to make lots of money. But when the only way you can break even is by keeping all the schedules so tight that you’re forced to run a bad operation in which all of your customers are treated poorly, then there’s something wrong with the whole concept. I’m against increased government regulation, but you’re just asking for it. The elected representatives can’t ignore an entire nation of unhappy fliers forever.

My trip back and forth to Washington, D.C. was a lot better than my aforementioned trip down to Jacksonville, but once again, US Airways found all sorts of ways to provide an awful experience.

First, there are three different lines at the US Airways ticket counter in Providence, and no indication of who or why you should choose to get into a particular line, although they are obviously for different purposes. Should I get into the shorter line if I want to use the kiosks? You’d think so, but no — apparently that was the line for people who wanted to change their tickets. Then one of the US Airways employees comes out and tells people they have to be patient, she’s doing the best she can, and says, “although I know that’s not good enough.” Well, yeah, it’s not good enough. Instead of spewing that rehearsed line to us, how about putting up some damn signs so it’s not so chaotic?

The aircraft we flew on to Washington turned out to be one of the little ones where you walk out onto the tarmac and board the plane via a little staircase. There was one flight attendant on board, and she appeared to be pretty new with the English language. I’ve heard the various flight attendant speeches a thousand times and I still couldn’t understand what she was saying. As soon as the in-flight beverage service was finished, she pulled out her luggage and started fixing her makeup. She continued to fix her makeup for the remainder of the flight, and then followed it up with a couple squirts of stinky perfume, which I had to endure from the front row. It was a 70-minute flight; her makeup and perfume couldn’t wait until afterwards? Or is this one of the things US Airways recommends in its “How to be as unprofessional as possible” manual?

For the flight home from Washington, the plane was scheduled to depart at 4:30 p.m., but it was apparently delayed 15 minutes for whatever reason. So US Airways helpfully changed the departure time to “4:45 p.m.” so they could say “ON TIME” as the status. Isn’t that cheating?

Finally, after we boarded the plane, the little screens come down to tell us the emergency procedures, and then, right after takeoff, the screens launch into 20 minutes of commercials for Hilton Hotels, Avis rental cars, and Las Vegas tourism (all of which I will try to avoid ever using as a result of their being associated with US Airways). Trying to escape the spam by reading, I open up my tray table, and get the eyeful shown above. An advertisement for some HTC phone, AT&T service and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Yet another thing making it less likely that I’ll pick up an iPhone, no matter how much I want one, because it’s only available on the AT&T network and anyone who would want to be associated with the ass-mangling that is a US Airways experience is not a company that I want anything to do with.

Here’s an article from another guy, Darren Barefoot, who had a similar crappy experience with US Airways’ in-flight advertising. I agree completely with him completely; why on earth would anyone want to associate their company with commercial airlines, an industry that quite probably has one of the worst customer experiences there is?

Tomorrow, I’m traveling to Washington, D.C. for work, where I’ll be demonstrating a new web application to one of our customers. Our contract carrier from Providence to Washington is US Airways, which is unfortunate, because I swore I’d never buy another ticket on US Airways after my trip down to Jacksonville in May to watch my sister’s college graduation and Navy commissioning. My flight down to Jacksonville was uneventful, but the trip back up to Providence was awful.

I arrived at the airport around 7 o’clock for my 8:30 a.m. flight. When I went to check in, they told me (and the rapidly growing group of angry customers around me) that because the flight crew that would be manning this flight got in too late last night and hadn’t had their FAA-required rest period, the flight had to be delayed until their rest requirement had been met. OK, US Airways Stupid Screw-up #1: There should be back-up flight crews in the system so that when things like this happen, it doesn’t mess up all the rest of the flights that day (and probably subsequent days, since the mandatory rest periods won’t be met yet again).

I couldn’t take the later flight, because that meant I’d miss my first plane change in Charlotte. So they switched my flight to one into Washington National, leaving at 11:30. A long, long morning sitting around the terminal in Jacksonville began.

Nothing went right in Washington. Planes sat at gates indefinitely because the flight crews hadn’t shown up. Planes landing and taxiing in couldn’t get a gate because they were taken up with planes that were missing crews. Some of the people sitting around me had been waiting for their flight to Boston for hours, and there was still no sign of when it was going to leave, or even what gate it might leave from. I finally arrived in Providence around 8 o’clock, more than 13 hours after beginning a journey that required less than 3 hours of actual flight time.

The moral of the story: US Airways can’t do diddly squat right. So I sure hope I don’t get stuck in an airport someplace on either leg of this upcoming trip. At least, thankfully, I have direct flights. So I can wait out any delays without worrying about missing connections.

This is the first time I’ve traveled for work in about a year and a half, after having traveled at least several times a year for the first 5 years on the job. I leave tomorrow afternoon and come home a day later, on Friday night. I was hoping that maybe I could see a Washington Nationals game tomorrow night but they’re away in Houston this week. Maybe I can still get a tour of RFK Stadium if it’s not already closed by the time I get settled in.