By JEFF BAILEY
Published: October 22, 2006
ATLANTA "” Seatback pockets hiding sticky surprises, carpets with patterns that can no longer conceal the curious stains, overripe lavatories and crevices oozing snack grit and plain old grime.

Increasingly, that describes the modern airliner, an untidy tube hurtling through the sky full of passengers who cannot wait to land and go wash their hands with disinfectant soap. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but in the airline industry it has taken a back seat to financial survival.

Airlines, which have been paring their fleets to cut costs, are flying their jets fuller than ever "” and, like New York City in the summer, some of them are just a little too crowded not to smell. After dispensing with the expense of most meal service, airlines invited passengers to bring their own food aboard, and many planes now land littered with a smorgasbord of wrappers and leftovers.

Once on the ground, there are fewer employees to tidy up, thanks to widespread layoffs. And planes, which make money only when they fly, sit at the gate for shorter periods, often making cleanup a rush job.

"You put your hand in the seatback pocket and there's an open McDonald's ketchup container in there," said Joe Brancatelli, a frequent flier who runs an advice Web site for business travelers. Tidiness has declined in recent years, he said. "The problem is they've made so many cuts."

When cleaning is outsourced, for instance, "it's another part of the airline business that goes to the lowest bidder," he said.

And when outside food was invited aboard, routines for taking care of trash went awry. "A lot of inconvenient garbage," Mr. Brancatelli said. "The airlines can't control it. They can't plan for it."

Little wonder, then, that Delta Air Lines, regrouping in bankruptcy, noticed earlier this year that it had let its 438 big jets become, in the words of Tim Canavan, director of operations, "dingy and dirty."

While the industry standard for deep-cleaning a jetliner "” a process similar to having your car professionally detailed "” is roughly every 30 days, Delta had let its schedule lapse to every 15 to 18 months. That is akin to cutting your daily shower back to once every couple of weeks.

Just months after Delta began installing new interiors, including pricey leather seats, Mr. Canavan and his staff were surprised to find that some of the planes were already filthy. Thus began a humbling airlinewide effort to become neater.

Two cleaning contractors were fired for slipshod performance. Deep cleaning "” an intense and precisely scripted process of brushing, scrubbing and vacuuming "” now occurs at least every 30 days on Delta planes, bringing Delta up to par. A crew of auditors checks up on the cleaners.

Delta is not the only airline paying closer attention to the issue since 9/11, when any number of niceties "” as well as basics "” were scrapped. More recently, bloggers, flight attendants and others have been taking note of filthy and fragrant conditions on planes; it is not clear how much of a difference some of the carriers' galvanized housekeeping efforts have made.

"There's still a long ways they have to go," said Linda Hirneise, who heads the travel practice at J. D. Power & Associates, a market research firm. Her company surveys passengers about airline cleanliness, and this year the top-ranked carrier "” JetBlue "” received an 8.49 on a 10-point scale.

But in Ms. Hirneise's opinion, "anything below a nine is flunking."

Delta came in third in this year's J. D. Power survey, behind JetBlue and Southwest. At the bottom of the survey, which ranked only North American airlines, were Northwest and US Airways.

"All carriers have room for improvement," Ms. Hirneise said. "Sometimes you pull those trays down and you just want to walk off the plane."

The Federal Aviation Administration does not set cleanliness standards, so the issue is mainly one of public perception.

"If the seat has crumbs in it, then you're probably not doing your engine maintenance "” that's how people think," said James F. Whitehurst, Delta's chief operating officer. "People are disgusted by dirty airplanes."

Passengers have the occasional unclean encounter on an airplane, but hygiene shortcomings may be most apparent to airline workers. JetBlue uses only leather seats, which show rather than conceal moisture. In part, that decision stems from a flight David Neeleman, JetBlue's chief executive, took before founding the carrier in 1999.


Published: October 22, 2006
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Boarding, he sat in a cloth seat and immediately felt, well, a suspicious moisture. All the seats were full. So he grabbed a blanket as buffer and gingerly settled in for the flight. "A really bad experience," he said.

C. J. Bostic, a flight attendant at Southwest Airlines for 35 years, has learned to spot trouble before it happens. "You have to keep a sharp eye if you see a lady going to the bathroom with a baby," she said. A diaper ditched in the lavatory trash will make its presence known three or four cities later.

"Most experienced travelers know to give it to you" for safekeeping in a sealed plastic bag, said Ms. Bostic, who carries her own room freshener.

She also picks up a lot of pizza boxes these days. And along with all the junk in seatback pockets, she said, "I find a cellphone at least once a day."

One reason that JetBlue and Southwest, two low-cost carriers, won high marks is that their planes are newer. Also, though they tend to have fewer ground employees than long-established airlines like United Airlines and American Airlines, they have company cultures that encourage flights attendants, gate agents and, at JetBlue, even pilots to tidy up.

Delta, with an aging fleet, says its own surveys show that passengers rate the food tastier, the seat roomier and the flight prompter when the plane's interior is new and clean.

AirTran Airways, Delta's biggest competitor in Atlanta, is currently promoting its newer fleet. In a television commercial, a passenger sits down, catches a whiff of his seat and begins to see ghosts of passengers past "” a cigar smoker, someone with digestive issues, a baby needing a diaper change, an airsickness sufferer and a sneezer.

"A plane with a long history? Not a good thing," the AirTran ad concludes.

In the face of all this, airlines maintain that they are trying to make a difference. Northwest said it deep-cleans narrow-body planes, like a DC-9, every 45 days, but wide-body planes, those seating more than six across, every 21 days. Longer flights are harder on interiors, Northwest said.

US Airways deep-cleans its planes every 60 days. "These were things that, unfortunately, went by the wayside while US Airways was trying to stay in business," a spokesman, Philip Gee, said. "We've spent a lot of money and time in the past year in cleaning up the cabins."

Still, many people think improvements are sorely needed. A look at Delta's cleaning process shows how deep the sanitizing has to go.

At a Delta hangar last Monday night, a Boeing 767 pulled in for a deep-cleaning after flying from Hawaii to Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Orlando and back to Atlanta. A crew of nine cleaners climbed aboard. The contractor they work for began serving Delta in July, when many planes were still caked in grime.

"When we first started, it was hard," said Ashley Brown, 19, one of the cleaners. "The planes were dirty. You had to be physical."

"It was a lot of stuff in the seats "” a lot of candy melted," said Bonice Pratt, 20, another cleaner.

The crew tackles the lavatories and galleys, but the most tedious job is pulling the cushion off each seat and, while squatting or on hands and knees, brushing and wiping and scrubbing away the accumulated gunk. At row 26 in coach, an overhead bin holds an unfinished dinner in a takeout carton, including a pile of limp French fries.

In bankruptcy, Delta has been able to escape contracts it entered into with cleaning firms and demand price cuts, so that even the new cleaning regimen has not raised the overall cleaning bill.

Flight attendants used to complain bitterly about the mess, said Dana Bartel, a manager and flight attendant. Now their remarks are quieter and more constructive, she said.

But neither the process "” nor the airplanes "” are pristine, Ms. Bartel said. "You get one result out of Atlanta, one out of New York."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/business/22dirty.html...DiOK9b5JhvM+U16t5atQ