Labor Holiday Flight Nightmares

Today's weather: High = 18 Low = 13
Cloudy and cool

Last 3 days was a stat holiday weekend --- International Labor Day to be exact. In the past, this used to be a 'golden week' of 7-days, along with the National Holiday in October. Now, the Labor Day Holiday is only 3 days, because the Chinese government added the Tomb Sweeping Holiday in April, and the Dragon Boat Holiday in June. Each of those is 3 days.

For those of us teachers who work fixed holidays according to the government calendar, travel can only be done during those times. To make a long story short, this is nothing but a nightmare for two reasons:

1. Everyone else is traveling during that time
2. Businesses are closed during that time, so you can't take advantage of the time off to do business

Conversely, the best kind of holidays in China are when most other people are working, for the fact that crowds will be less on public transportation and you can take advantage of the business hours.

The holiday was spent combined with lounging in Shanghai and a trip to Hong Kong. The holiday was successful for the most part, but as usual, I want to focus on the negative.

That is to say, there is a growing sense of unrest and dissatisfaction among the Chinese public when it comes to domestic air travel. This is a problem that the government only knows all too well and is doing their very best to solve. If last night was any indication, the air travel problem is SERIOUS and in my opinion, is now approaching a crisis situation.

The problem is very simple to desribe, but also very disturbing. So far, of all transport methods in China, air travel has always been the best "guarantee" to get somewhere quickly and conveniently. As any long-term resident of China would certainly know, the train stations are hopeless during public holidays, and the scenes of unruly crowds, pushing, rudeness, and frustration, yelling, fights, etc. are common. It's getting better with the high-speed trains and buses. Still a long way to go, but my money is on the bullet trains as a way to solve this air travel crisis. The government also thinks the same way on this issue, so that's great. .

How would you feel if the common chaos and frustrations at train stations started to appear at airports? How would you feel if passengers routinely pushed their way towards service desks, boarding counters, and frequently got into arguments with boarding staff? How would you feel if difficulties were resolved with long and drawn out confrontations involving crowds of people yelling with the boarding gate staff, and then hasty negotiations to deal with the situation? How would you feel if flight delays were as common as train delays and handled in the same way, with the staff telling very little information, not caring, not apologizing, and leaving the public in the dark? Chances are you'd feel sick.

If you're like me you'd start to ask about alternatives to airplanes. The traveling public perceives the airplane as a more expensive alternative than the train because they think it can circumvent the problems and inconveniences that would otherwise be at the train station during public holidays. But when airports have reached the same level of frustration, then what? Are we now supposed to go strapping on jetpacks?

I honestly think the best solution is continuous development and improvements to the high-speed rail network. High-speed trains have the bonus of not only being fast, but most importantly they INCREASE CAPACITY on a given crowded route. For example, once the long-awaited Shanghai-Beijing train starts running, they will have trains going every 15-20 minutes, and each train can fit maybe 1000 people tops. This is far better than the current situation where you have a flight every 30 minutes or so on average, and a flight only holds 150 people.

But until the high-speed train network can succifiently develop to cover a wider service area, and the transport to and from the actual train stations be improved, the mainly upper-middle class Chinese public will continue to rely on airplanes for long-distance travel.

The problem is this. More and more people have cash. Air travel is affordable for many and along with that is the perception and expectation that the flights should be convenient. They may have been convenient in the past, but the system has really deteriorated in recent years, combined with the huge increase in those who are actually flying now.

For example, I was at Shenzhen last night and waited 6 hours for a delayed flight back to Shanghai. It should have arrived at 9pm, it didn't arrive until 3am and I still had to teach the next day (today). How's that for surviving on just a few hours of sleep, or in effect, being robbed of 6 hours of sleep due to this literal nightmare.

A lengthy flight delay is aggravating enough, but to make matters worse, there was no information being told about the delay, no announcements made, and no sense of the boarding staff showing concern or apology. Frankly, you can't blame them for not caring because air travel delays are so common they deal with this daily. Why should they care for the "customer" when they face throngs of rude people all the time, knowing there's always gonna be more people the next day who will fly out of necessity.

Besides, the airport staff are all overworked to begin with. I heard the security people say they'd be working until at least 3am that night to deal with all the backlog, and the air traffic control would be tackling a backlog of flights well past midnight that were supposed to take off that night around 9pm or 10pm. As a general rule, Chinese domestic flights are not allowed to run after midnight.

There was plenty of time to take many walks around the airport waiting hall last night and survey just how bad things really were. For every annoucement being made about a delay, there was an unannounced delay or simply no information being given out. My flight was in the latter category. I'd approach the desk and ask for information, of course, only to be told something like, "There is a delay" or "We can't board right now" or "Just wait a minute" or "Maybe it will leave around 11pm" It actually left at 1am.

The comment which really made me laugh was, "Air traffic control says there are too many planes in the sky."

I eventually gestured to some benches and said, "I will be sleeping over there. When it's time to board, someone please come and wake me up."

My flight was 6 hours delayed. The flight to Wuhan was 5 hours delayed. The Chongqing flight was 4 hours delayed. Another flight to Changsha was 3 hours delayed. The Changsha delayed was not delayed that long relative to the others, but that particular delay caused all hell to break loose at the boarding gate.

The reason is that Changsha (in Hunan province) isn't as far as the other destinations above. It is also accessible via the high-speed bullet train from Guangzhou. If you first take a train from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, then transfer to the 'gao tie' (bullet train), the whole trip will take maybe 3-4 hours. A flight takes about an hour. Passengers were screaming mad because they knew that if they had INFORMATION that their flight was 3 hours delayed, they would simply cancel their tickets and head for the train stations. But since they were told the same old crap that I was told above, they just kept waiting.

The point of no return was when the passengers for the Changsha flight could calculate for sure that they would have gotten to their destination faster by using the high-speed train. At that point, they rendered their waiting as a total waste of time, and they were just so goddamn mad because of the approach taken by the aiport staff.

What happened next was like something straight out of the pages of the 'Left Behind Series', an excellent fictional book series about a not-so-fictional period in time called the tribulation period leading up to the end of the world. Fun stuff, eh. Hardly. Will have to save that for a promised upcoming blog about end-of-the-world events which I haven't had time to get up and running just now

So at the airport, passengers starting getting into loud yelling matches with the staff, babies were screaming and wailing, crowds began to form, the police and security got involved, and it wasn't long before a full-blown brawl happened at the boarding gate between the passengers and the staff. More and more people joined in. Several of the onlookers caught the entire footage on their Ipods and cell phone cameras. I stayed back to watch from a distance. It was ugly.

The end result was that the passengers got together and refused to board the plane when boarding was finally called. They would not board until they got full compensation and a full refund for the ticket. This was all negotiated hastily with the airport police involved of course, and it took another hour to settle things down and to finally get everyone on the plane. This of course would only make things worse when the plane landed as it would be even further delayed on the other end. Of course, no information would be relayed to the other end, so the people there would be equally in the dark.

This was obviously the worst part of the flight situation, but all throughout the airport there were minor conflicts and squabbles related to the delays.

As much as I'd like to say that lengthy flight delays are the worst case scenario, they are not. The worst case is when the flights actually get cancelled. This happened to me twice actually, in the last several years. But since there is no information given when a delay happens, the worst fear among the public is that the airline or the airport will suddenly announce that the delay has now turned into a canceled flight.

This whole thing is just really, really bad. My conclusion is this: there is no point to even bother with travel during these public holidays anymore, regardless of the means of transportation. Next time there is a Chinese public holiday, I will stay home, relax, and do nothing, and there isn't a damn thing that anyone can do to try and get me to leave Shanghai during these public holidays.

Unfortunately, this same kind of situation happened during National Holiday last October where I was also forced to travel during this madness. I only wish that people from outside of China could understand how much of a nightmare it really is to travel during these times, and to show a little more sympathy the next time it happens to be a Chinese public holiday peak period and someone is supposed to travel then.