In the spring of 2020, when there wasn’t much else happening, I took a long walk through Greenpoint's industrial fringe, eventually wandering down a long warehouse block where a cluster of idling cars at a parking lot entrance provided an anomalous sign of life in an otherwise desolate landscape.
A similar thing happens with regional airlines. In the same way a hamburger is just a hamburger until it reaches the end user, a flight on these carriers is the same regardless of which airlines its flying on behalf of until it becomes a segment on your itinerary. Same flight crews, same flight attendants, often the same ground handling agents- just at the next counter down than they were an hour ago.
Those ruptures you mention don't happen too often in this space (and I'm not sure the traveling public would much care anyway), but once they do, you can't unsee them.
Great point. It's a pervasive and growing phenomenon. I actually almost included the following excerpt from Venkatesh Rao's post about "Globalism 2.0," which aligns very well with your observation:
"The nice little regional airline I took from Singapore to my parent’s home town of Coimbatore in 2018, Silk Air, appears to have gone out of business. So this time I had to take a significantly more threadbare new budget airline called Scoot, complete with cheery lemon-yellow dollar-store aesthetics (“our flight attendants, also called scoots, are here to serve you”). It was...tolerable. It got me from Point A to Point B. It’s part of the Mujification aesthetic of SP3. A post-brand world that somehow manages to be commoditized and differentiated at the same time. Where names, if they exist at all, mean nothing and point to nowhere and nowhen."
A similar thing happens with regional airlines. In the same way a hamburger is just a hamburger until it reaches the end user, a flight on these carriers is the same regardless of which airlines its flying on behalf of until it becomes a segment on your itinerary. Same flight crews, same flight attendants, often the same ground handling agents- just at the next counter down than they were an hour ago.
Those ruptures you mention don't happen too often in this space (and I'm not sure the traveling public would much care anyway), but once they do, you can't unsee them.
Great point. It's a pervasive and growing phenomenon. I actually almost included the following excerpt from Venkatesh Rao's post about "Globalism 2.0," which aligns very well with your observation:
"The nice little regional airline I took from Singapore to my parent’s home town of Coimbatore in 2018, Silk Air, appears to have gone out of business. So this time I had to take a significantly more threadbare new budget airline called Scoot, complete with cheery lemon-yellow dollar-store aesthetics (“our flight attendants, also called scoots, are here to serve you”). It was...tolerable. It got me from Point A to Point B. It’s part of the Mujification aesthetic of SP3. A post-brand world that somehow manages to be commoditized and differentiated at the same time. Where names, if they exist at all, mean nothing and point to nowhere and nowhen."
Full post here: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/globalism-20-service-pack-3
Thanks for the link!