Low Cost Airlines

Posted on June 22, 2007 in Travel by byronb

I used to think that low cost airlines were great. After all, who doesn’t like cheap airfares. Let’s face it - few of us can afford to jump up and jet around the world any time we feel like it. Nonetheless, with cheap tickets online, there are more opportunities than ever before. With a low cost airline, you can cut your fare in half, or even more. Best of all, many of these discount carriers have better service than some of the traditional airlines. Frontier and Southwest, for example, are much better than Northwest! After flying on these low cost airlines, I would never use Northwest again. It costs much more, and the service is abysmal!

What I didn’t realize was the pitfalls of low cost airlines. I am not talking about the low cost American airlines that I mentioned, but some of the more obscure ones around the world. Basically, in many parts of the world, anyone with an airplane and a few government connections can run a low cost airline. This never really registered with me when I was scheduling my trip to India. I figured that the low cost Indian airline would be just the same as any other one that I might use. Although I saw that it was using a turboprop instead of a normal jet plane, this didn’t worry me too much. It wasn’t a very long flight, and I figured that a turboprop was the best choice if you didn’t have many people to ferry. I didn’t realize what a nightmare this flight would be.

It was an absolute terror! One of the engines stalled several times while we were in flight, the aircraft smelled terrible, the lights flickered off a few times, and the pilot was flying erratically as if he were drunk. I actually thought that I would never make it out of there alive! No matter how low cost airlines are, none of them are worth losing your life for. Although my experience on that flight was not typical of low-cost airlines, I soon found out that it wasn’t that unusual either. Many people I’ve talked to had similar experiences traveling in unfamiliar parts of the world. Like me, they were unaware of the dangers of some of the smaller air carriers. They set out to save a little bit of money, but a few of them almost lost their lives!