Frequent Fliers Get Back Up

It’s been a rough morning for Peter Van Zandt’s briefcase. First, airport security wrestled it to the ground and pulled up the lining. Then it was passed through the X-ray machine--seven times--with various contents in and out. Security screeners scrutinized his Dictaphone like it was some find from an archeological dig.

The San Francisco lawyer knows how his briefcase feels. A few days before, it was Van Zandt who stepped through a metal detector that wouldn’t stop its angry bleating until he had practically disrobed. After two decades molding himself into a master of airports, the seasoned business flier, husband and father of four was reduced to running for the gate, his belt in one hand, a shoe in the other.

He missed the plane. And he had arrived two hours early.

Over the years, Van Zandt, 40, has flown through scary weather and waited out fog. He flew after his father was killed in a small-plane accident and after a Boeing 727 carrying him across South America banked so hard it almost turned over.

But nothing has tested the mettle of Van Zandt and other business fliers like the disasters of Sept. 11 and the myriad hiccups and convulsions wrought upon air travel since.

Through it all, business travelers have been delayed, rescheduled, unpacked and frisked. Yet most of them never stopped flying.

In the last three months, they have found a profusion of new procedures and new emotions. They have fought to overcome airport dysfunction, often shedding their in-flight cocoons in the process. They take a quiet pride in knowing they’re flying when millions of Americans are on the ground, still agonizing over when to take their first post-9/11 journey.

“I fly so much that if I became afraid to fly it would affect my work, my personal life--and frankly, I refuse to stop doing something I have a right to do,” Van Zandt says. “It’s more out of spite than anything else that I fly.”

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Southwest Airlines Flight 582, San Jose to L.A. The sky is dusky as Neil Goldman sits in his usual window seat, eating a cinnamon roll and carrying another in a bag for his wife. “I’m surprised companies aren’t selling parachutes to people,” says Goldman, 37, the president of a financial services consulting firm. He scans the cabin, only one-third full. “What if you had parachutes for the three sections of the plane?”

Would he buy one?

“Would I? No!” he protests. This is just an intellectual exercise for amusement at the end of a long day. He turns to bioterrorism and how people will protect themselves against it. A portrait of the newly outfitted business flier takes shape:

“Gas mask, parachute, Palm Pilot,” Goldman says, laughing.

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Here’s the basic difference between the infrequent flier and the business traveler: The infrequent flier fears the plane ride. The business traveler fears the journey through the airport to the plane.

So they’ve conquered their fears by conquering the airport.

Pulling tidy roll-on bags and clutching minuscule cell phones, they cut a graceful swath through the bedraggled, over-packed masses. They slipped into executive lounges to wait for flights and emerged for priority seating. They knew how to walk into the airport at 6:30 a.m. and get on a 7 a.m. flight.

At least, they did know. After Sept. 11, all that order was upended. A 7 a.m. flight that once required a 5:30 a.m. wake-up now has businesspeople setting their alarms for 4 a.m. to confront unpredictable airport lines.

“My time in airports has gone from 10 hours a week to 20,” says Katie Nichols, who monitors clinical drug trials and flies four times a week.

But there are few alternatives to the airlines. A 55-minute flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco still wins out over the 10-hour nightmare of a train ride. So fliers have rededicated themselves to mastering the new ways of airports and airlines.

Van Zandt avoids flying Fridays--”amateur day”--and divests himself of all objects--”pens, pencils, wallet, phone, my ring and my watch too”--before stepping through a metal detector.

When the central terminal parking lots of Los Angeles International Airport were closed in October and hapless travelers were shuttling to lots a mile away, Goldman discovered a better option: A private lot, Park One, right next to the Southwest Airlines terminal, was still accessible.

For weeks, use of the lot delivered an added bonus--a free pass around the police checkpoint that excluded private vehicles.

Ronnie Dail’s timesaving epiphany came in October, when he realized that he didn’t have to wait in a massive pileup of desperate people standing outside the only door open that day into the United Airlines ticketing lobby. Instead, Dail, a health-care industry consultant with Accenture, walked to the far end of the terminal, past most of the entrances United had closed off temporarily. Then he turned toward one of the closed terminal doors--and a uniformed guard inside the lobby opened it for him.

“It works every time,” Dail said one morning with a modest grin, after being granted access. “You just walk up with purpose. They open the door.”

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Peter Logan looks out the window as he feels the United Airlines jet powering up to take off from San Francisco International Airport. “I love this part--it’s still magic,” he says, grinning. “You’re in a big bus and then you’re flying. We’re off the ground. . . . Your car does not go off the ground.”

The San Francisco lawyer, on his way to a court appearance in Los Angeles, is the rare business traveler who enjoys the ride. He doesn’t mind that he had to buy a belt with a smaller buckle to accommodate the metal detector--or that the safety pins holding together the inside of his trousers pocket set off the metal detector anyway.

His reward for his fortitude is a luxuriously half-full plane, a relief for the 6-foot-4, 53-year-old Logan, who likes a row with extra legroom. “I guess I feel guilty thinking it’s nice that there are some empty seats. I don’t want to think about that. And it’s not going to last.”

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Ask business travelers whether they’re afraid to fly, and here’s what they say:

Mark Larson, internal auditor: “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.”

Van Zandt, the lawyer: “If your ticket gets punched, it gets punched.”

Nichols, the drug-trial monitor: “If this plane is going to fall, this plane is going to fall.”

If you travel thousands of miles a year, fear of flying would be a heavy piece of baggage to carry. Most have left that steamer trunk at home.

But they occasionally reveal flickers of fear. Even Van Zandt, who has never let any crash stop him from flying, now prefers to sit in the front of the plane. “I want to be the first one to get hit by whatever we get hit by,” he says. “I don’t want to see it coming toward me.”

“I always introduce myself to the person I’m sitting next to,” says Julian Cran, a 35-year-old engineer with an energy company. “Because if you need to be saved, it’s easier to say, ‘Oh my God, where’s Julian?’ rather than, ‘Where’s that guy who was sitting next to me?’ ”

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As passengers file on and take their seats, the United Airlines captain proudly points out her cockpit door, newly strengthened with two vertical strips of metal. “Beautiful, huh?” she says to a passenger.

For Ronnie Dail, 32, the decision to fly has less to do with cockpit doors than the news. Since he resumed his weekly schedule of flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Mondays and returning on Thursdays, he has devoured the news. If it’s grave enough, he won’t fly at all: When the U.S. first retaliated in Afghanistan, he canceled his flight the following Monday morning.

A few days later, he arrived at an airport repeating a CNN story about credible threats against the U.S. But now, he has become accustomed to the rhythms of war and warnings. As he waits to fly to San Francisco, the news he brings from his weekend TV watching is not of international terrorism.

“Carolina beat Virginia,” he reports.

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In late November, business travel was down 20% to 30% from the year before, a result of the recession and fear. Tressa Williams is one business flier who will confess to anxiety. Before she boarded her first post-Sept. 11 flight, she made a point of telling her 13-year-old son as he left for school that she loved him. She bade her husband a lingering farewell. “Never before have I left for the flight and felt like I’ve really got to say goodbye to my husband and give him a kiss,” says the 39-year-old State Farm insurance consultant.

“I guess I was acting like a baby,” Williams says, once she is comfortably ensconced on a Southwest flight from San Jose to Los Angeles. The plane is filled with business fliers, families and a tour group on its way to Catalina.

For Williams, who flies about once a month, the short trip is a building block. “It’s like, ‘I’ve flown, I’ve done this now,’ ” she says. The next step will be more of an emotional challenge: cross-country, from San Jose to Atlanta.

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As appearances go, a plane trip since Sept. 11 looks surprisingly like a plane trip before Sept. 11. There are no uniformed soldiers patrolling the aisle. In the cabin, people sleep or read. In the galley, flight attendants chatter about their lives, their disobedient dogs. Occasionally, a pilot will give an impassioned speech about flying in the post-9/11 era. But more often, the captain reports on the weather ahead or explains that you’re delayed on the tarmac because the fuel door is broken.

The only drama on most planes is being played out silently in passengers’ minds: worrying whether the turbulence is normal; wondering whether they would grab a seat cushion to fight off a hijacker; pondering whom they would call to bid farewell, in the manner of the now-famous passengers of Flight 93.

“How did those guys get cell reception?” Jamie Bland, a 35-year-old Seattle executive, muses as he flies from Los Angeles to San Francisco one morning. “I was going for a run the other day, and I thought: ‘What would you do if you had two minutes to call your family?’ ” The fantasy is broken by the appearance of the flight attendant. “More cookies?” she asks brightly.

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Business travelers once moved through an airport or an airplane as if they existed in a sphere apart from the rest of the flying public. They buried themselves in their laptops and their work.

On board they read or slept, ignoring the flight attendants’ instructions about emergency exits, sometimes disregarding orders to shut down portable CD players during takeoff.

But the post-9/11 business flier is emerging from that cocoon, alert now to the quirks of fellow passengers. Who looks nervous, who seems agitated, who is acting odd? “Truth is, I don’t know what I’m looking for,” confides Logan, on a flight to San Francisco.

They’re looking anyway, though. Fueled by patriotism and an almost tribal protectiveness, they talk about being ready to rise up out of their seats to battle a would-be hijacker. They know they haven’t been tested, they know it sounds like bravado, but still they feel it.

And they’re betting that feeling may be the one thing that now unites all fliers, the frequent and the infrequent, first class and coach, business travelers and tourists. Suddenly, business fliers have an unspoken bond with the rest of the plane.

“I’m the sort of person who’d take off his belt and snap it around someone’s neck,” Van Zandt says. “I’d tackle him. And I’m sure there would be five people in line ahead of me ready to do the same. I think little old ladies would be willing to stick their canes out. How many times have we heard ‘The Star-Spangled Banner?’ That always made me tear up when it gets to ‘home of the brave.’ ”

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Tressa Williams nurses a cup of herbal tea as the American Airlines flight from San Jose to Dallas pulls out of the gate in the inky predawn. By the time she makes her connecting flight and gets to Atlanta, she will have barely an hour before her first evening event. She doesn’t mind. Before Sept. 11, she would have insisted on a quicker, nonstop flight. But breaking the trip into two legs has made it psychologically easier.

The captain’s voice filters through the cabin. It’s as if he’s soothing her soul and confirming that desire for bonding that fliers are feeling.

“As you’re all aware, the events of Sept. 11 have changed many things,” Capt. Randall Julius says. “We have many security measures you can see and many you can’t. Some flights have air marshals.”

He concludes with this: “We are proud to exercise our freedom to fly. And we appreciate you flying with us.”

Williams’ face lights up with surprise. “Have you heard that before? Did you hear what he said about air marshals?” Her fears dispelled, she sounds almost giddy with a sense of adventure and determination. “I was thinking, ‘He’s really talking about Sept. 11!’ Which really makes me happy. It says, ‘Don’t play with us.’ Yes!”

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