Attention All Passengers

February 13, 2012
Air travel, once glamorous, is now an ordeal for passengers, a financial drain for investors, and a nearly unsustainable business model for the dwindling number of U.S. airlines. McGee, a former flight operations manager turned journalist and consumer advocate, explains what’s wrong with commercial air travel in his debut book. The wonder is that it doesn’t run to thousands of pages. He quickly cites as a cause the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, which transformed airlines from public utilities run on a quasi-monopolistic basis to a free market business. McGee sides with critics who call for some reregulation to improve passenger experience and airline safety, and stabilize business operations. The dissection of major airlines’ use of regional carriers with lower safety standards for short flights, among other troubling practices, makes this an effective polemic. However, though he backs his assertions with statistics that show “airline accidents caused by maintenance factors have increased significantly in recent years,” McGee’s extensive research yields a jumble of confusing references to various accidents, a slew of names from many interviews, and an occasional slip into professional jargon, distracting from an otherwise compelling read. Agent: Rob Weisbach, Rob Weisbach Creative Management.

June 1, 2012
Award-winning Consumer Reports travel journalist McGee (Creative Writing/Hofstra Univ.) delivers a workmanlike tell-all about the airline industry. "[I]t pains me to see what's happened to what was at one time the exhilarating experience of boarding a flight," writes the author. "Today, commercial flying sucks. And everyone knows it." Indeed. Although he worked for three different airlines between 1985 and 1992 (all of which were "financially liquidated"), he derives most of the book from his interviews with, among others, flight attendants, congressmen, an FAA whistleblower and family members of an individual who died in a plane crash. McGee explains how the shortcomings of airlines can and do cost consumers more than a comfortable flight; they result in unsafe conditions. In his well-researched narrative, the author exposes the common practice of outsourcing repairs, which can result in crashes because the companies doing the repairs are not as competent or as tightly regulated. Furthermore, in at least one incident in which shoddy repairs resulted in a crash and a lawsuit, the big-name airline attempted to protect its brand by dumping the blame on the smaller company. The smaller company subsequently restarted operations under a new name. McGee's exploration of this lack of accountability is intriguing and often damning for the companies cited. Eventually, however, the book becomes repetitive. The author's rant against customer service, though certainly justified, is far from original, and he often rehashes his valid points with excess explanation and anecdotes. Informative but not terribly entertaining.

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February 15, 2012

An award-winning travel journalist for Consumer Reports, McGee talked to pilots, mechanics, passengers, airline CEOs, and more to offer this critique of the friendly skies. Here, he shows executives cutting costs by relinquishing flights to regional lines and outsourcing repairs to inexperienced mechanics abroad. With a 35,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2012
McGee spent nearly seven years in airline flight-management operations. He is an award-winning travel journalist for Consumer Reports and USAToday.com. As a former airline insider, McGee laments how the commoditization of the industry is resulting in an across-the-board decline in the quality of service and an increase in the frustration and anxiety levels of passengers. Flying simply isn't fun anymore, and it's not just about the security line. Airlines have outsourced everything from customer service to maintenance to flying itself. Few passengers are even aware that smaller routes are subcontracted to regional airlines, despite the major airline name on the plane. Thankfully, commercial aviation is still the safest way to travel, and the airline industry's safety record has steadily improved from the 1950s and '60s, yet the industry has been slow to implement recommendations about setting work-hour limits for flight crews to prevent fatigue. McGee's Manifesto for Taking Back Our Skies includes partial reregulation, a national transportation policy, higher standards for regional airlines, a curtailing on maintenance outsourcing, and a codified passenger bill of rights.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)