In plane language, airlines are sorry

DALLAS — Airlines are getting serious about saying they're sorry.

After a spate of nightmarish service disruptions, American Airlines, JetBlue Airways and others are sending more apologies, hoping to head off customer complaints and quell talk of new consumer-protection regulations from Congress. But no airline accepts blame quite like Southwest Airlines, which employs Fred Taylor Jr. as what could be called chief apology officer.

His formal title is senior manager of proactive customer communications. But Taylor, 37, rail thin and mildly compulsive, by his own admission, spends his 12-hour workdays finding out how Southwest disappointed its customers and then firing off homespun letters of apology.

"Erring on the side of caution, our captain decided to return to Phoenix rather than second-guess the smell that was in the cabin," Taylor wrote to passengers who were on a March 7 flight to Albuquerque, N.M. A faulty valve was to blame. "Not toxic, it was obviously annoying," he assured them, throwing in a free voucher for future travel.

He composes about 180 letters a year explaining what went wrong on particular flights and, with about 110 passengers per flight, he mails roughly 20,000 mea culpas. Each one bears his direct phone line.

This year, he already has exceeded that total because Southwest sent written apologies to 22,000 passengers who passed through a choked airport in Las Vegas on Feb. 19 and 20. (That letter listed a general customer-service number.)

Even on good days, big airlines have plenty to be sorry about: a tragicomic mix of broken planes, sick passengers and scary landings.

Rather than rely entirely on weary front-line workers, many airlines are institutionalizing the apology. American Airlines said its apology letters were running twice the level of a year ago. JetBlue now e-mails an apology within 36 hours of certain service failures. And Continental Airlines and US Airways both say they are sending more apology letters.

Taylor, of Southwest, also writes an internal daily report, used by others at the airline to explain service failings. It is leavened with a comic touch.

Recapping a troubled flight from Las Vegas to San Jose, Calif., last April 18, for instance, he explained that the plane had circled back after takeoff because the landing gear would not retract. And there was more.

"During the return, a customer became ill and apparently 'decorated' three rows of seats — and perhaps a few customers," he wrote.

Taylor says he tries to maintain the customer's point of view. In a recent daily report he wrote of a San Diego-Las Vegas flight that was diverted to Los Angeles on Nov. 17 because the landing gear would not stay in the wheel well.

"The landing was routine from a piloting perspective. The customers' perspective was another story," he wrote, because they had been told to assume the brace position on landing.

"We'll send a follow-up explanation and an apology for scaring the stuffing out of these customers."