Why Flying Sucks Lately
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 August 2021
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Flying has been a drag for years now. But there’s an extra level of stress on commercial flights this summer. Why is flying so terrible at this moment? And what’s a traveler to do?
Guest: Scott McCartney, the Middle Seat columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Earlier this summer, the nation cleaved into two camps. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm not talking about masks or vaccines or political affiliations. |
| 0:13.9 | The camps organize themselves around this question. |
| 0:17.5 | Are you for duct tape or against it? |
| 0:21.0 | There is uproar today after an out-of-control passenger accused of groping the flight attendants |
| 0:27.3 | was duct taped to his seat and the airline suspended the flight crew. |
| 0:31.5 | I think tape his ass up. |
| 0:33.4 | So they took this step, which is probably not in the flight attendant's handbook? |
| 0:36.4 | This story immediately made me and my family think about the terrible flights we've been on. |
| 0:42.1 | Flights that turned us on our fellow passengers. |
| 0:44.9 | Flights that made us temporarily homicidal. |
| 0:48.1 | And to think, for all those years, we could have just asked the flight crew to get out the duct tape. |
| 0:53.2 | The flight attendants restrained this passenger to his seat using something called restraint tape. |
| 0:59.8 | Okay, fine. Restraint tape. |
| 1:02.2 | This summer has been so crazy. |
| 1:04.0 | We've actually had, I think, three different duct tape episodes. |
| 1:08.6 | What? |
| 1:09.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:10.1 | Scott McCartney writes about airlines for the Wall Street Journal. He's on team duct tape episodes. What? Yeah. Scott McCartney writes about airlines for the Wall Street Journal. |
| 1:14.0 | He's on team duct tape. |
| 1:15.7 | If that's what it takes, that's what it takes. |
| 1:18.5 | It's a dictatorship. |
... |
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