I Had to Fly Commercial and No One Apologized
Status shock at 35,000 feet.
There are many ways to experience inconvenience.
Most are obvious. Delays. Crowds. Noise.
Some are more subtle.
They occur not when something goes wrong, but when something fails to be acknowledged.
Recently, I was required to fly commercial.
This was not due to hardship. It was a scheduling irregularity.
A connecting aircraft was unavailable. A substitution was made.
Such things happen.
What was unusual was not the travel itself.
It was that no one apologized.
The flight departed on time. The seat was adequate. The service was professional.
Objectively, nothing was amiss.
And yet something was missing.
In environments to which I am accustomed, disruption is accompanied by recognition.
When arrangements change, there is a ritual response.
Explanations are offered. Regret is expressed. Adjustments are made.
Even when outcomes cannot be altered, acknowledgment is provided.
This is not courtesy. It is calibration.
It signals that one’s expectations were understood, even if unmet.
On this occasion, I was treated as though the circumstances were normal.
Which, for most passengers, they were.
This was the disorientation.
I was not delayed.
I was reclassified.
The experience revealed an unspoken hierarchy of service environments.
In certain systems, inconvenience is exceptional.
In others, it is assumed.
In private aviation, disruption is framed as an error.
In commercial travel, it is framed as a condition.
The difference is not comfort.
It is orientation.
In elite systems, the individual is the reference point.
In mass systems, the system is.
The commercial airline does not consider itself to have failed.
It has merely operated.
This is why no apology is necessary.
The passenger is not the subject of the process.
They are an element within it.
What unsettles is not the loss of luxury.
It is the loss of recognition.
One is no longer someone for whom arrangements are curated.
One becomes someone for whom procedures are applied.
The language shifts accordingly.
Instead of explanation, there is policy.
Instead of discretion, there is protocol.
Instead of accommodation, there is throughput.
No one is rude.
No one is unkind.
The indifference is structural.
This is the true shock of returning to mass systems.
Not that they are uncomfortable.
But that they are uninterested.
The traveler accustomed to individualized service discovers what it feels like to be properly processed.
Efficiently.
Politely.
Impersonally.
And this is why the absence of apology is so noticeable.
It is the moment when one realizes that one has exited a world organized around exception and entered a world organized around volume.
Nothing has gone wrong.
One has simply fallen back into the general case.
This is not a complaint.
It is an observation.
The commercial flight did exactly what it was designed to do.
Which is why no apology was required.
The system functioned.
Only the classification changed.
Filed under: Affluence