Fly the Friendly Skies?

Do you ever wonder what happened to the Friendly Skies?

Let me tell you, after months of dealing with heavily-accented, relatively-inept customer service reps, it kinda makes you miss the old United Airlines spirit.



Shoddy customer service, punctuated by Rhapsody in Blue on hold: It's a sign of the times.

"The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights"

There's a great story I heard years ago while working in Papua New Guinea about a helicopter landing in a remote tribal village. When it landed, the village elders gathered and first brought it food, lest it be famished after such a flight. Then they proceeded to walk from the back to the front repeatedly, trying to figure out if it was a boy helicopter or a girl helicopter.

Since then, I assume they figured out that helicopters don't eat yams.

I was reminded of this story, while coming across a small bit of news from Nepal today. The national airline there recently had some issues with an airplane similar to this one:


In Nepal, apparently, if your airplane doesn't want to fly, it must be the work of an angry deity.

So instead of just quietly fixing the plane to avoid drawing too much attention to mechanical issues, they chose a different path: Ritual goat sacrifices.

I hope they also had some good mechanics around, respectfully, as a backup measure.