Catching a morning flight is like crossing hurdles. It's not always simple to wake up on a cold early morning, specifically when you have downed innumerable number of pegs and went off to sleep late and drunk, to struggle and get on to a flight. Packing was done the night before given that security and logistics hurdles that you must go through to make it on the plane is nightmarish.
Liquids and gels go in a one corner. Contact lens cleaner go to the other corner. Think hard on what bags to carry, now that there are regulations for bags too. Which bag should I take? And if you are a sporadic and non frequent flyer, such aspects are easy to forget.
It gets harder when your airport is a good two-hour drive away, an irritant thing, translating into an hour of lost sleep the few lucky people take for granted.
Once at the airport, there is the sensitive matter of steering through the security. Shoes, laptops, belts, loose change, jewelry watch, et all — gets dumped into containers and shoved through the X-ray machine, and we comply because we desperately want to get to the destination.
It is a marvel that the system works despite these and countless other interventions in the natural right to travel. Think of the numerous coordination problems that get solved, daily, at the major airports of the world.
My flight is a measly dot. It left at 8:05 a.m., and landed at my destination at 11:15 a.m. My plane began the day and end up at the destination without any stops. And this was just one of the hundreds of planes operating that single day at a single airport.
Before my boarding, the plane was loaded and unloaded with food and drink, fuel and garbage, cleaning crews and airplane mechanics. The pilot, copilot and stewards were exchanged for new ones. When determining its schedule, the airline must consider the time necessary for taxiing the plane, something that differs from airport to airport. My plane taxied for what seemed like 30 minutes, but when it was finally in the air, intricate computations helped it to arrive at the predetermined time.
Multiply this by hundreds of flights an hour going in all routes; and reflect on the synchronization of stacks of decentralized workers attached in some way to the airport, to say nothing of the paying customers whose desire to fly justifies all of the activity. How does it all get done?
It happens in spite of the Govt. or its lapse, no matter what our Aviation minister tells us. It works because of the interaction between property rights and prices. Property rights, when well-defined and cared for, generate motivations for self-interested owners to exploit resources in various ways that encourage the social good.
Market prices guide property owners to arrange resources in different forms: wages for pilots, baggage handlers, airplane mechanics, and airport bartenders; loans that help fund training facilities, airports, and aircraft themselves; ticket scanning machines and automatic-flush toilets; and even the food that you are served once up in the air. No authority could pull off such an astounding accomplishment of harmonization, and yet it occurs day in and day out.
Sure, there are hiccups, but they are so odd that they make the lead story in the evening news when they transpire. In spite of the Govt. control of so many facets of modern commercial air travel, I made it to my destination with no problem and with much help from thousands of people I didn't know. What's remarkable is that it is still considered, by so many as, unremarkable.
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