Homebound to Newburgh on a Thursday afternoon, the awful word CANCELED greeted me at Delta's ATL departures board.
     "I can confirm you on a flight tomorrow morning and put you on standby for this evening's flight," said the ticket-counter agent.
     Fine.
     She printed out the standby boarding pass.  Twenty minutes later, finally at the head of the pre-security line, the lady checking boarding passes said, "This is no good.  It's for tomorrow."  The idiot agent had given me a standby pass for the next-morning flight on which I was supposedly confirmed.
     Back to the counter for the proper standby pass.  Eight hours later, the night flight to Newburgh, by that time already delayed two hours, left without me, solidly overbooked.
     Waiting in the rain for the hotel courtesy van with my single small roll-on bag and no do-or-die appointments to keep, I realized that I was the lucky one: no luggage cart filled with duct-taped suitcases, no baby in a snugglie or twins in a stroller, no pet in a crate, no road-warrior trolley of electronic equipage, no wheelchair or walker--all of them amply in evidence around me.  I shared the van with a soldier just back from 14 months in Iraq, also the victim of a cancellation, who was watching his 10-day leave tick away, his wife and two daughters awaiting him at home.
     The next morning, it turned out my "confirmed flight" was actually yet another standby.  "Can you put me on another airline?" I begged a ticket agent.  (American and United both serve Newburgh.)  "Oh, just go to the gate, you'll get aboard," the agent said.  Which turned out to mean, "You don't have a prayer of getting aboard, since it's way overbooked, but get outa my face."
     Two standby sessions later, I finally board an afternoon airplane, exactly 24 hours after my original canceled flight.
     What this taught me is that the inflexibility and overcrowding of the airlines simply mean personal disaster when bad weather or the failings of an ancient air-traffic control system--pretty much the same one I used as a pilot in the 1970s and '80s--cause canceled flights.  When airliners are 95 percent full (or, worse, 105 percent overbooked) and 100 unfortunate passengers suddenly find themselves canceled, there's nowhere to put them.  Some frequent fliers have savvy company travel agents who re-route them, others game the system and get space on other carriers, still others say the hell with it and go home or drive...but the rest of us are slowly salted into the few available seats on future flights, at enormous cost to our comfort and convenience.
     The airlines are locked into a box of their own making.  They are an industry with enormous fixed costs--incomprehensibly expensive aircraft burning millions of gallons of jet fuel and operated by well-paid crews--yet they are selling instantly perishable commodities called "seats."  If an airliner takes off with empty seats, they are as valuable as rotten eggs.  So the airlines sell them for whatever they can get.  $500 coast-to-coast?  How about $50?  Hell, how about $5?  It's better than nothing.
     Imagine if the automobile industry sold new cars for $500 just to get them off the lot. Would you ever again pay $50,000 for a nice Lexus?  Of course not.  Not surprisingly, the airline industry is unique among business enterprises in never having earned a profit--not one dime--since the dawn of flight.
      Will I continue to fly?  Only when I absolutely have to.