Attention All Passengers: The Airlines' Dangerous Descent-- and How to Reclaim Our Skies

The author of Attention All Passengers has a serious ax to grind with the airline industry. He had worked there during the glorious heyday, and finds just about everything wrong that he can. Some of his issues are trivial (or represent paranoia), while others do show real issues. He is concerned that deregulation has lead to a race to the bottom. He is willing to heap praise on the airlines when they do something he agrees with. (Southwest's lack of bag fees and customer-centric nature are praised, while American's domestic maintenance is also complimented.) However, with the constant mention of the trivial, it is hard to filter out what is important.
He spent a long time passionately advocated for child restraints. I disagree with his premises, especially with the slippery slope it leads to. (Car booster seats tend to provide no advantage over just using a seat belt. And, since airplanes only have lap belts, there is no advantage. Perhaps we would have seats flying instead of babies.) Currently, passengers can choose to pay for a seat for an infant and use a restraint, or they can hold them. In a rare instant of extreme impact, the unrestrained baby may become a projectile. People have regularly determined that the risk is more than made up for in the value saved by not buying a seat.
He cites a number of whistleblowers that have identified "bad practices." There is also a very strong support for "US-first" labor. Anything done outside of the United States is seen as suspect. I can see justification in requiring all shops to adhere to the same standards to ensure quality and fairness. However, just because it is done in the US does not make it better. He does provide an example of a union group successfully bidding on maintenance work in order to "in-house" the work. This seems like a much more positive approach. Otherwise, we could end up with something like the Jones Act on water which needlessly raises the cost of domestic shipping (and helps support cruise traffic to Victoria and Vancouver.)
Customer service is an area where airlines have nosedived recently. Innovation has primarily been to eek out more revenue while still appearing to have cheap tickets. The yield management formulas provide a huge variety of prices for what is essentially the same thing transportation from A to B. Security has further made the experience more miserable. (And the benefit is questionable as it often responds to the "last" threat rather than new ones.) Airlines have an odd relationship. They have been granted antitrust immunity to code-share with other airlines on certain routes, while at the same time providing identical service on other routes. There is little benefit in having two 50-70 seat regional jets fly the same route at the same time. (While they will be painted in the colors of major airlines, they would be operated by regional carriers.) Having some sharing here could make it better for everyone. A 130 seat plane could have more total capacity, yet operate cheaper, use less fuel and not clog the air traffic control system. Many of the routes served by small planes are small enough that they would be better served by trains. A unified transportation network would be the key. Very few people are traveling from one airport or another. They are usually using a variety of means to travel from point A to point B. An airplane is merely the "big leg" of the journey. Airlines compete on driving the upfront cost of the "big leg". Meanwhile, the airports want parking revenue, the airlines want additional revenue, and the railroad tracks that would go straight from A to B are only occupied by an occasional freight train. The author mentions the example of San Diego to Los Angeles, which is covered by dozens of hour-long regional jet flights each day. High speed rail could easily connect the two cities in that amount of time, providing frequent connections to the airport and downtown. (In China, Nanjing to Shanghai service covers a distance 50 miles greater in about an hour, with trains going to an airport and downtown.)
There are many other areas where the airlines can be improved, such as passenger comfort and contracts of carriage, and simply functioning like service company instead of a utility. Safety is one area where the airlines have done remarkably well (and where they are highly regulated.) Perhaps some regulation would be helpful to prevent some of the waste in the airline route map. Modernization of air traffic control would also be beneficial. (However, if done poorly, it could contribute to more "bad behavior". If the airlines are unwilling to step up to make an efficient multi-modal transportation network, it may be time for some nudges.