Read about this outrage in which United – who recently cancelled my frequent flier miles when I was just a few hundred shy of a free ticket, not that I’m bitter – abandoned 110 people in Wyoming. You haven’t heard much about this. Not nearly as much as you’ve heard about, oh, JetBlue.

There’s also been a lot of publicity recently about JetBlue having an industry-low on time rate. But as baseball expert Nate Silver notes, that has more to do with JetBlue’s routes, not their performance.

Now might the assault on JetBlue — and the relative kid gloves used on United — have something to do with United being unionized while JetBlue isn’t?

Naaaaaah. It’s not like they did that do Airtran. Oh, wait.

Bias aside, the airlines still need to clean up their act. As Silver notes in the linked article, they’ve improved. They put realistic arrival times on schedules and you no longer need to go Abu Ghraib on them to find out why your plane is late. And — this can not be overemphasized for someone who flies in white-knuckle fear — their safety record is outstanding. But there are still times when they don’t get it.