Customer Reviews

Frequent Flyer: One Plane, One Passenger, and the Spectacular Feat of Commercial Flight

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2 star:		(1)
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A friend recommend this book to me because I fly Delta Airlines frequently. I picked it up in a bookstore and started reading it on an airplane. This is a fascinating story of Delta Airlines and a Lockheed L1011 aircraft. The author spends three days with the aircraft, flying where ever it does. Along the way, he meets pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, air traffic controllers, gate agents, baggage handlers, and passengers. You would think this would be a big yawn, but it is an engaging and well written book. If you can find a copy, this is a must read.

Anyone who is interested in airlines, airplanes, airports, anything aviation should read this book. I work for Delta, the airline Bob Reiss wrote about, and I learned things I didn't even know. Also any buff of the L-1011 aircraft (the best first class I ever rode in) would love this. Get this book!!! Pay what you have to, but get this book.

It is not Reiss' fault that events since "Frequent Flyer" appeared in 1994 have made flying a different experience than the one he describes, but even looked at in isolation the book was a disappointment.

The first problem is that it is not written very well. Reiss seems unhappy using complete sentences, for example, which comes across as sloppy rather than conversational. He continually refers to people by their full name and title, which is tedious, and makes one suspect that he originally intended to publish the book as a series of articles. There is no real coherence to how chapters are selected and put together, and his need to keep Delta happy to preserve access to the cockpit clearly affects his partiality. It is true that Delta cannot have been happy about the discussion of the damaged wing strut, but I'd be willing to bet the chapter wasn't written until after Reiss had gotten what he needed from the front of the plane.

In addition, the author's ability to fly in First Class when not actually in the cockpit means he got a substantially different perspective on flying than most Delta passengers. It would have been interesting to hear more about the experiences of flyers in middle economy seats.

Other potentially interesting subjects are mentioned only peripherally or ignored altogether. Just a few that I would have wanted more information about include: What precisely occurs when crew members "bid" for routes? What do flight crews do during their evenings together in foreign cities? How is lost luggage tracked down? Are some of the stories we hear about safety-such as pilots not being allowed to eat the same food during a flight to mitigate the danger of food poisoning-actually true? What social structures exist among pilots, engineers and flight attendants, and do they differ among airlines? How exactly do airlines price their premium cabins? And as for sex on planes, I can guarantee that readers would have been more interested in sex between cabin staff and passengers rather than between cabin staff alone.

Flying is a fascinating subject, but I don't feel as if I know substantially more about it than I did before reading the book.