El Al and Israir: Compare and Contrast

Normally, when you’re getting on a plane, you expect the plane you’re getting on to belong to the company whose name is on your ticket. Of course, except if it’s a code-sharing flight. You wouldn’t really expect, though, that if you bought a ticket on Israir, you would be given a boarding pass that was printed on SwissAir paper, and to then board a plane with NORTH AMERICAN AIRLINES written giant letters on the fuselage, complemented by an American flag graphic that looked like it came out of Microsoft word at the suggestion of an animated paper clip. So, when I asked the gate agent what North American Airlines was, in Hebrew, she replied, “oh, we hooked you up” (chiparnu otchem). As in, because of high demand, and the fact that Israir had only been flying the JFK-TLV route for a few months, they decided to subcontract this particular flight to another charter company. Essentially, North American is a khapper set up to serve El Al, the Jewish equivalent of a gypsy cab. On a plane full of almost all Israelis of one sort or another, the breakdown of passengers was about 60% children and the remaining 40% the adults who were accompanying them. Naturally, each and every adult on the plane though he/she was important enough to not obey the crew’s requests to remain seated. Instead, they cavalierly moved about the cabin to fuss with their carry-on baggage in the overhead bins or go to the bathroom, or stroll down the aisle to chat with another passenger, causing us to miss the 4:50 departure time by a long-shot. When we finally did leave the gate at 5:30 or so, we had to queue up for takeoff because we had missed our turn, so wound up taking off an hour and fifteen minutes later than scheduled. Good thing I showed up three hours prior to departure. The stewardesses, who were all primped-up Americans dressed in conservative 1970s-style outfits, clearly had no idea what they were in for. They were also subcontracted. In contrast, the two native Israir flight attendants, who I’m assuming were there to ensure that the Israir brand experience was fully conveyed to the passengers on this flight, were wearing jean skirts and orange polos, and didn’t seem to care about very much. The Israir experience is quite different than its only competitor, El Al. It’s also funny how little effort the company makes to conceal the fact that Israir is simply a cheap knockoff. El Al has pretty visible security (em, sekyoority) from the moment you come into the terminal (although Terminal 4 at JFK is very insecure). El Al’s ground representatives ask you the security questions very firmly: “Who packed your bags?” “Did you take presents from anyone while you were here?” “Where are you staying in Israel?” and the like; once they even asked my sister if she knew what Passover was. If you pass cross-examination, your bags get tagged with neon colored stickers featuring a word of the day, in this case, Venice. They usually come in sets of cities, fruits, trees, etc. Last time I got tamar (date palm). On El Al, they seem pretty serious with you the whole way through, but on Israir, they just don’t seem to care very much. There isn’t (as far as I could tell) a guy that’s obviously a highly trained _shabak_agent flying with you in coach, to whom the pilot delivers an ambiguous brown envelope before takeoff, which the guy promptly shoves into his backpack. With Israir, you get the El Al security car to accompany the plane’s taxi to the runway, because they don’t have their own. They don’t even have their own ice bucket. One stewardesses had one that actually said “El Al” on it, and another that looked like it had been smuggled out of a cheap interstate motel. Then of course there is the subject of food. Not the food itself, but rather, the procedure of distributing the food. First, the 80 or so people who had asked for glatt kosher meals got served. Naturally, these meals weren’t distributed with food carts, per the usual. The confused American stewardesses went running about the cabin checking passenger lists and tossing packets labeled “GLATT KOSHER REGAL MEAL” onto the appropriate tray-tables. Then, down the aisles came the food carts, and they began distributing meals to the rest of the passengers. As if to make some sort of point about the quality of service, the regular meals had “ISRAIR ECONOMY CLASS OMELET” stamped on the wrapper, and were double-wrapped, lest an unkosher contaminant attempt to corrupt an unsuspecting diner.

On El Al, even most of the female staff are extremely attractive. From those who ask you if you have a bomb in your suitcase to the stewardesses, one is just more beautiful than the next. Israir, on the other hand, where everything is done half-assed, the women were just not good looking enough to make it onto an El Al crew… The grammatically correct Hebraized English form of this question would be: “Em, you know what is North American Airlines?”