Air France are complete scumbags. Unfortunately, they are typically the best/fastest option when flying with Delta to Europe.
As for EU companies being shit, I can only laugh. Customer service might be apparently "friendly" in the USA but fuck you if you expect actual compensation for delays or cancellations. There are just zero regulations, so they don't care. They will however smile and call you buddy while explaining to you that they won't do anything and you better not complain again or they'll charge you extra fees. Which I guess has been dubbed as "customer service excellence" elsewhere in this thread.
In my case, my mother and sister were left stranded in CDG during Covid after being denied boarding to the US (EU travel ban). We were unfortunately not aware that the ban also applied to transits.
AF customer service in CDG kept redirecting them and provided absolutely zero assistance. They didn’t even help them book a return flight! In the end, I had to book them a hotel online for the night (in the airport) as well as a return flight to their origin. Obviously, the online complaint I filed with them went straight to the trash, so I was never compensated.
The AF agent at the departure point should have picked this up as it was most certainly the first thing they check for when your final destination is the US.
I have never had such an experience with any US airline. Even Spirit compensated me for delayed luggage without a fuss.
But the absolute worst airline I’ve ever dealt with is Royal Air Maroc. I would probably think twice before flying with them for free..
You sound like you have an axe to grind. As an American I’ve never experienced this from any company.
I have, on the other hand, had a flight cancelled and got a free hotel, rebooking and meal voucher automatically without talking to customer service.
That's often the minimum the EU airlines will do, in order to distract their passenger from the €250-600 compensation to which they are entitled.
Considering the terrible service we get from US air carriers, we certanly all do have "an axe to grind" with them.
I can agree with original poster that service level from United and Delta has been consistently worse than Swiss or Air France every single time (and that doesn't include the paranoid amplified security theater on US carriers).
In all seriousness though, I've traveled between the US, EU, and Japan in the last 5 years, and haven't had any problems, luckily. The one place where I see the US really sucks compared to the others, though, is security: going through TSA is not a very nice experience, and having to take your shoes off is pretty stupid. And having to leave the line or throw your (reusable) water bottle away if there's water in it is idiotic, and only the US does that AFAICT. Going through security anyplace else is a much better experience. This of course is not the airlines' fault.
The other big difference between these places/flights I saw is what kind of passengers you're sharing the plane with; American passengers are more annoying to be around, in general. But that's not the airlines' fault either.
The latter part about high-altitude stall recovery was, IIRC, previously absent entirely.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
Not just saying that, I've flown with them twice over the last year and another booked in a few months. After SingAir and maybe Thai, I think they're among the best in the region.
LionAir and AirAsia, on the other hand, I wouldn't get on even if their tickets were free...
From the Wikipedia article:
On 17 April 2023, Airbus and Air France were both acquitted of manslaughter.
> In a July 2011 article in Aviation Week, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger was quoted as saying the crash was a "seminal accident" and suggested that pilots would be able to better handle upsets of this type if they had an indication of the wing's angle of attack (AoA).[264] By contrast, aviation author Captain Bill Palmer has expressed doubts that an AoA indicator would have saved AF447, writing: "as the PF [pilot flying] seemed to be ignoring the more fundamental indicators of pitch and attitude, along with numerous stall warnings, one could question what difference a rarely used AoA gauge would have made".[265]
I think there is a high percentage (probably a majority) of 15-hour, pre-solo student pilots who could have broken the stall of AF447 well above 30K feet.
Another reference that goes a little more into it, but short of reading the official report: https://degreesofcertainty.blog/2019/05/08/air-france-flight...
> The pilot at the controls that night was Pierre-Cédric Bonin. Although he had clocked up many hours in an Airbus cockpit, his actual experience of manually flying a plane like the A330 was minimal. His role had primarily been to monitor the automatic system. The time he had spent manually flying would likely have been focused on take-off and landing. So, when the autopilot disengaged, because ice crystals had begun to form inside the air-speed sensors in the fuselage, he didn’t know what to do. The fly-by-wire system downgraded itself to a mode that gave Bonin less assistance. With the safety net gone, the plane was now liable to stall if conditions allowed, and Bonin inadvertently proceeded to create those conditions.
...
> The Air France 447 pilots ‘were hideously incompetent,’ says William Langewiesche, author of the Vanity Fair article
From what I've seen online and from acquaintances, RyanAir's quality varies depending on the route while traditional airlines have just in general become worse over time.
Ryanair will happily sell you whatever privilege you desire. Priority boarding, seat selection, a nice sandwich.
With the legacy airlines you often need to build up points with them first. I much rather fly Ryanair because it's less hassle to get what I need.
The problems people have with it usually stem from wanting something but not wanting to pay for it. Bringing too much carryon. Trying to sit together as a family without paying for seat selection and then hassling other passengers on board to move. Stuff like that. Just pay the fee, it's still cheaper than the legacy airline would have been.
One way or another they have no incentive to be anything but terrible to their passengers.
I believe it's thanks to that competition being mostly low-cost that we've now got a race to the bottom in terms of customer service.
Luckily delay compensation exists in the EU, otherwise there would be no difference between them nowadays.
Governments cannot provide aid beyond what a reasonable investor would do. The current European Commissioner for Competition (incumbent since 2014) has had particularly strong focus on that. Several flag carriers that got unreasonable subsidies went bankrupt after they were forced to pay back subsidies.
Beyond the European Commission, competitors can challenge approved aid, and they have done so, and they have sometimes won: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/eu-court-...