Flying blind

After hearing Jeremy Hunt banging on about introducing 'airline' like safety to the NHS, a budget airline decided to try introducing NHS like safety to their airline. Here is a leaked response to a customer complaint:

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Dear valued customer

Thank you for choosing Porc Air. I'm sorry your experience was below your expectations. I hope to address the points detailed in your letter. 

Firstly, you relate concerns about the airworthiness of the aircraft itself. I should point out that the airline doesn't actually own any of its own aircraft. You think we would, considering we're an airline. Wrong, buddy. Although we are liable for all the running costs - staff, fuel etc. a private company rents us the aircraft at high costs, while making additional profit from the selling of snacks, drinks, oxygen masks etc. Please direct any concerns to them (good luck with that!)

Secondly, I'm sorry you were disappointed that you had to share your seat during the flight. In order to streamline costs and provide an 'enhanced' service, we have upped passenger numbers without increasing plane size or seating numbers ( remember we don't actually own the planes)

Thirdly, the lack of safety demonstration is now company policy. We have a number of targets we have to achieve during each flight (quota of duty free sold etc) which is set by head office. You'd think some of these would relate to passenger safety - but no. This also explains why stewardesses were not able to respond to your passenger call button - you wouldn't believe the amount of paperwork they have to complete during a flight. And there's far fewer of them around nowadays anyway for some reason.

Fourthly I'm sorry you ended up in the wrong country. I'll hold my hands up to that one. What we do now is only give the pilots 80% of the fuel they need to get to the destination, and ask them to make 'efficiency savings' on the way. Sometimes they don't manage this and they have to divert to somewhere closer. But to be fair the pilots had been up all night and work a 90 hour week, so they weren't at their best. They're grumbling about their working conditions, but it's not like they have a highly transferable set of skills is it? Anyway, you're lucky it didn't crash, right? Look on the bright-side. 

Lastly you note your luggage never made it to the terminal. To be honest, once you're off the plane you're not our problem anymore. All the non-plane stuff is done by a separate company, and we don't speak to each other.

So, thanks again for writing to us. If you have any concerns please forward them on to the flights ombudsman. By a happy coincidence, that's run by the company that hire the planes to us, so it'll save you writing two letters. Bonus!