Cranky’s 6 Favorite Fights

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No, it’s not a typo. This isn’t about my six favorite flights. Today, I’m talking about fights, and not ones started by commenters. (Ok, the fifth one was….)

Usually I’m more than happy to just opine from my ivory tower, but sometimes the subjects of my posts decide they want to rumble. It always makes for good blog fodder when they do. Here are some of my favorites fights, in date order.

  • The Long Beach City Council Freaks Out – In an interview with me, JetBlue CEO Dave Barger threatened a pull-out of Long Beach if the city didn’t get its act together on building the long-promised new concourse to replace the trailers that served as gate areas. The City Council freaked out. Instead of admitting the process was taking too long, they tried to discredit me and scold JetBlue. Brilliant. In the end, the concourse was built, and we all know JetBlue is still here.
  • A Union Twists Statistics – UNITE HERE was trying to slam Lufthansa by putting out bad analysis of complaint statistics, and I called them out on it. You’d think they’d just leave it alone, but no. Instead, they made the mistake of responding and digging an even bigger hole for themselves.
  • Peter Greenberg and the Tall Tale – I couldn’t sit there when Peter Greenberg told a story on the now-defunct BNET site that seemed entirely too fishy to be true as presented. As a writer for BNET at the time, I penned a post calling him out on it. BNET refused to publish it. Once my BNET days were done, I dusted it off and published it myself. Funny, I haven’t been invited back on Peter’s radio show since then.
  • American And How to Handle PR About Safety – Back before the merger, American had a spate of safety issues in a short period of time. Remember when the seats came loose on 757s? Yeah, that. I said American’s PR response wasn’t adequate, and the VP of Comms, Andy Backover, emailed me to disagree. I published our initial back-and-forth, but it didn’t stop there. There was one final response from Andy before this whole thing ended.
  • The Righteous Commenter Who Thinks I’m a Bad Parent – I’ve certainly been in heated discussions with commenters before, but there was one comment involving traveling with kids that made me so mad I decided to turn it into its own post. Apparently there is a way to ensure toddlers always behave perfectly. Who knew?
  • American’s Flight Attendants and Bad Decisions – I ripped into American’s flight attendants when they voted down a contract. There was no upside to doing so and they only hurt themselves. Wanna guess how some flight attendants felt about that? That wasn’t the only post they didn’t like. Some of the emails I received. Whew.

Those are my favorites. Any more that you think should have made the list?

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6 comments on “Cranky’s 6 Favorite Fights

  1. Cranky,

    I have to say I’m disappointed Kate Hanni didn’t make the list. Or is there a list of Cranky’s Favorite Crazies coming soon?

      1. Ugh. Re-reading that conversation made my head spin. Really brought to mind the old axiom that it is, “Better to shut your mouth and let people think you are an idiot than to open it and remove all doubt.”

  2. I think it is safe to say that almost any post that you write about labor (or that criticizes or otherwise fails to follow the union line) tends to stir up a fight, at least in the comments.

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