People Expressing Themselves

By John Skow

The flight attendant's after-takeoff chant is so familiar that to an experienced traveler it sounds like "Blah, blah, blah, seat belts. Mumble, jumble, life vests under your seats." Suddenly there is an ear-opening sentence: "Welcome to People Express, the fastest-growing airline in the history of aviation!" Welcome, indeed. We are aboard People's el cheapo $149 Newark-to-London flight, and the mood of most of us is light to the point of giddiness. Who cares if it costs $3 to check a suitcase? Most of us are traveling light. So what if instead of the free, creamed-Styrofoam bits that most airlines serve for meals, we have to pay $6 for a boxed lunch? Leg room is minimal, every one of the 390 coach seats is occupied. But we are flying in a real 747 jumbo jet, and 6 1/2 hours from now we will arrive in England.

The pinchpenny flights (a little more than half the lowest regular coach fare) have been running at capacity since a fortnight after People began its London service on May 26th, and are sold out through mid-September. But there are always stand-by seats; a People reservation requires no advance payment--fares are collected on board--and there are a lot of no-shows. As few as ten and as many as 90 or more stand-by places are available on a typical night. The trouble is that People is not hooked up to the national computer reservation clearance, and its phone service is primitive. For each departure there are likely to be twice as many would-be passengers as seats. Those who lose out have the choice of taking a taxi to a nearby motel, which is not in the spirit of cut-rate fares, or sleeping on the marble floor of Newark airport's dreary North Terminal.

On a mid-July Saturday afternoon, some 150 dazed travelers kept their vigil. Many had camped in the terminal for four days. "I've had it! I want a bath, I want a bed, I want clean clothes," said Sharon Mann, 23, a drama student in a formerly yellow blouse. Aleyda Warren, a Londoner who had been visiting friends in Connecticut, figured that she had spent $100 during her four days in line. Other standbys were cheerful: Bill Lockyer and his wife Joy, a retired couple from New Zealand, had seen a Broadway show (Elizabeth Taylor in Private Lives) with the money they would save on People. A bargain, said Lockyer; if they lost out on the Saturday plane they would line up the next day at 6 a.m.

David McConnell, a young Irishman who had just earned an M.A. degree in geology from Oklahoma State, had tried a desperate stratagem after failing to make the cut. He and a friend flew via People from Newark to Atlantic City and back in the morning, for $23 each way. This put them on a priority list of People's incoming passengers. But, said McConnell, so many other line squatters had done the same thing that priority might not mean much. "You get rather paranoid," he said. The major gripe is that the airline does not carry over stand-by lists from day to day, so that time served is not rewarded.

At 6 p.m., a customer-service manager intoned the names of several dozen standbys whose stay in purgatory was over. A big grin from McConnell. Another from Joseph Young, 41, an amiable, heavy-set black architect from Philadelphia who had spent 2 1/2 days in line. Yelps and dancing from Sharon Mann, and weak cheers from her friends whose names had not yet been announced.

Stories filter back from Europe about all-night parties on People flights, or about women who dress for the occasion in nothing but sweaters and pantyhose. Not tonight; we were wearier, more wrinkled and better acquainted than most plane populations, but we were not bizarre. As Newark fell away behind us like a beer can thrown out of a car window, we rediscovered each other ("Hey, there's Noam!" "The punk kids made it!") and pondered whether, at a price, to order coffee, tea or gin. Back at North Terminal, only a grubby memory now, veteran squatters were getting comfortable in front of the stand-by counter, and newcomers were wondering how they would live through the night.

--By John Skow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.