Fright of flying

In the past month I've flown Southwest Airlines® on 4 separate occasions. Now, I'm not totally sure its fair for me to say this is a review on Southwest. I think this is more about the general quality of flying "post-9/11". Two out of the four flights were great. Smooth takeoff, pleasant in-flight service, clean bathroom, smooth landing, etc. The other two, however, were an absolute nightmare come to life. I can't recall the takeoff being overly uncomfortable, but in-flight to landing, where should I start?

The attendants were nothing short of rude. One woke me up by pulling one of the ear buds from my headphones out of my ear and said, "Want a beverage?" How about you wake me up politely and say a complete sentence? The bathroom was atrocious, and I'm not sure if I can blame that on someone who was in before me, or sheer laziness of the crew between the flight before us and our flight.

Lets move on to quality of the flying itself. During two out of the four aforementioned flights, I completely gave myself up to God and confessed my sins because I was that convinced we were going to die. One of which, the bright yellow "sign-of-nothing-good" oxygen masks fell from their compartments and passengers frantically started grabbing at them like a group of homeless people at a five dollar bill in the gutter.

The reason I am not convinced my poor experience was entirely at the fault of Southwest Airlines® has to do with quality of life, for the crew. Did you know commercial airline pilots make an average of $35,000/year? That's it? That's actually quiet frightening. You don't think someone controlling a 110,000-200,000 lb* hunk of metal that carries 100-250 passengers* should be motivated to fly well (and not scare the life out of their passengers) by a better salary? There is no way, regardless of how much I enjoyed piloting an aircraft, you could get me to put the lives of that many people in my tiny hands at that salary.

*figures based on a typical Boeing 737

"LUV" is not in the air
TS