If it is any consolation the thunderstorms here in Chicago were awful the entire day.  Like tree branches thorn, traffic lights of, etc… Glad you weren’t “up there” because even at ground level it was scary :p

If there is another airline that wouldn’t have done the exact same thing, please tell me. As far as I can see, airlines are like cellphone carriers and politicians . . . no one loves them, and there are only degrees of bad.

I’ve never been bumped or canceled on United, USAir, Delta, Continental or Southwest (though I don’t like the latter for other reasons). Even AA was decent a couple of years ago. While waiting in line to find out what was going on, everyone was trading horror stories about AA (and not just about Chicago). Apparently its service and cust service have gone south.

Somehow the United flight made it there this afternoon. One of the people delayed on my flight called their family in Chicago, and the storms had passed quite some time before the flight was canceled, so something about this didn’t quite square to some of us.

I got stuck in DFW for five hours because of Murkin, and I would have been much happier if they had been honest with us from the start that it wasn’t “just weather” but that the plane had had some problems with mechanical stuff too that delayed departure to Calgary by three more hours than weather had!

Liars and asshats - I’m just glad that I had planned an additional day ahead to get to my brother’s wedding and arrived late, but still had an overnight and morning before meeting with my dad and driving out from Calgary.

I really think, with these airline behemoths, so much depends on who you actually deal with personally and how good/bad a day they have been having.

pam, whoever claimed the storms had passed at that point was wrong, the storms didn’t even get super intense until 7ish central time, so 8 your time. and i echo renmiri on not wanting to be up there today, the lightning was hella intense and i kno some areas had hail and tornado warnings too.

i have to admit i don’t understand the lack of an early morning flight into chicago tho, ffs o’hare is one of the busiest hubs in the country, you would think there would be flights heading there at all hours.

AA is one of my least favorite airlines. Perhaps because they hub at DFW. No offense Amanda but I could spend the rest of my life without setting foot in Texas. Besides DFW is a horrible airport which is difficult to get around in and seems to shut down for weather delays far too often for my liking.

It is fashionable in Denver to dis on United (we are one of their hubs) but I’ve always been given a fair shake from UAL. When weather causes flight delays the UAL gate attendants seem fairly well informed about what is going on and communicate reasonably well. They also have a feature onboard where you can listen to Air Traffic Control. This gives you the ability to hear exactly what the pilots are hearing from ATC about weather delays and when they are expected to lift. While sitting on the tarmac it is nice to hear a controller tell your pilot “get into position and as soon as this lifts your are first in line.” Makes waiting on the tarmac a little more bearable. It is also fun listening to the ground controllers move planes around at O’Hare—those men and women work hard. (Okay I’m a geek and I admit it.)

Given a choice I like Frontier a lot but they are a regional airline so aren’t an option on a lot of trips.

All things being equal I try to book early morning flights. They are the least likely to be affected by weather delays or by the delays out of LaGuardia/JFK/Newark which seem to cascade across the system.

American hubs in both Chicago and Dallas. Both are cities prone to weather delays during the summer. This might have something to do with your experience. The AA aircraft might have been delayed out of DFW resulting in a delay to Chicago. The UAL flight might have arrived on time from Dulles or Denver and been in position to leave in a narrow weather window.

Yea, and you know what I really hate? Getting poked in the eye with a stick. That and extremely hot humid days when you can’t see the sky for the mosquitos. And diarrhea. Diarrhea really sucks. Like when you’ve got cholera. I hate cholera. I could go on, but I wouldn’t want to bore you.

Yeah, AA is the worst. They are simply my last-choice airline: unreliable and unapologetic about it. The only reason AA gets business at all is by code-sharing with better airlines, like Qantas.

I always wonder why it’s so hard to fly through rain. The buses run when it’s raining, after all. How crappy are modern planes and/or pilots that a downpour can fuck up flights across the country for a day or more?

Downpours are obviously going to get worse as the climate changes. Where are those bullet trains?

Oh, I was supposed to relate a horror story sorry.

Years ago (1977?) I was flying from Heathrow in London to O’Hare in Chicago. The flight was uneventful until we hit Chicago. It was January and Chicago was getting hit by a blizzard. We circled Chicago for a couple hours and the pilot came on and said we had to divert to Kansas City because we were low on fuel. So off we go to KC, circle KC for awhile and then land. Well we were an international flight and KC was not equipped to handle customs. So we were stuck on the tarmac for a couple hours. (I wonder if they would fuel a passenger loaded plane today.) We finally take-off and fly back to O’Hare and circle for a couple more hours. When we do land there are no gates available for us so we sit on the tarmac. Finally, over 20 hours after leaving Heathrow, we find a gate at O’Hare. I played hundreds of games of Gin Rummy with my seat mate, a little old lady from Green Bay.

Another more recent experience was flying from Denver to New Orleans on American. We change at DFW and slowly drive out to the runway. I swear the runways are so far away from the terminal at DFW you would be better parking the planes at the runways and taking a bus to them. Well there was a cloud over the airport so we sat on the tarmac for three hours, engines off, doors closed, no ventilation, no water in the hot Texas sun (yes sun, I’m not sure why we were sitting out there). Ever since then I do not board an airplane without a large bottle of water and a sandwich or two (at least a chocolate bar).

I was stuck on the tarmac at La Guardia once but had used miles to upgrade to 1st. I tell you there is a big difference between sitting on the tarmac in 1st and sitting on the tarmac in coach.

Oddly enough I still love to fly. Whether it is a little ten seater turboprop in heavy turbulence over the Rockies or a brand spanking new 777 20,000 feet above the cloud tops I love to be on an airplane.

I think a lot of this is luck. Continental has ended up being my bad luck airline, through no fault of its own really. Today in Chicago, though, my friends were worried about tree branches taking out the windows of their cars as they sat parked on the street. Crazy weather.

Hershele Ostropoler : I always wonder why it’s so hard to fly through rain. The buses run when it’s raining, after all. How crappy are modern planes and/or pilots that a downpour can fuck up flights across the country for a day or more?

Microbursts and turbulence in Cumulonimbus clouds (thunderheads) have a way of depriving an airplane of lift. When you are at 20,000 or 30,000 feet in several hundred tons of metal the last thing you want is a loss of lift. Lift, after all, is what keeps you in the air. It is even more dangerous below 10,000 (take-off and landing) when there is less margin for error. It doesn’t matter how much thrust you provide if you ain’t got lift you ain’t staying in the air.
To greatly simplify a very complex equation you want more air flowing underneath the airfoil (wing) than is flowing above the airfoil. The turbulence in thunderstorms has a way of changing that with detrimental affect.

Hershele, it’s not so much the rain as I think it is the wind. I’ve flown on several flights in rain of various intensity but any cross-winds and there are often delays.  Of course, to be fair, most of time, cross-winds are in the middle of storms so it may not be just the wind. I interned at Sunstrand once who was working on a portion of Triple 7 (777) for Bowing. I was in one meeting with some engineers and they were complaining about some computer tests didn’t show that a cross-wind problem had been fixed. I was working on a review of the auto-pilot system and one of my tasks was to time/find the longest route through the code.  In nearly every case, it had to do with either lighting or heavy winds.

As for the subject of the post,I generally fly on United but that is due to a relative to works there and can get us cheaper flights as long as we are find being on Stand By.  If I have to be at my destination by a certain time, I don’t use those tickets.  Otherwise, flight at 10% of the face value (not 10% off, 10% of the face value) of the flight one-way is quite a deal if I’m on a vacation.

Not a horror story, but a fun tale of airline frustration.
A few years ago, I went to France for a few weeks as part of my college French class. We flew British Airways.
Although there were some scheduling issues on the way out, they mostly resolved themselves (two members of our group had to take a later flight, the rest of us almost missed our connection in Heathrow.) During the hours that we waited around De Gaulle we discovered… that nearly none of our group’s checked luggage made it to the airport. When would we get it? Four days later.
I, being naive, had only what I was wearing, and a change of shirt and underwear. The airline told us they’d reimburse us for 50 euros for clothes.
Although a few of the bags took several days longer to reach their destination, they all eventually made it.

Flying back, I deliberately packed my two new dresses in my carry-on. Our flight out of Heathrow, however, was delayed—the pilot said it was to make sure we had the luggage. I turned to my friend from my group, much relieved.
My bag ended up getting lost for 16 days on the way back to the states.

Funny, aside from that trip, I’ve never checked a bag.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the time I was flying home from New Orleans on inauguration day, and hours of delays meant that I was sitting in an airplane on the tarmac, not doing anything, during the inauguration. That was US Airways.

Knock on wood I’ve only had one bag lost and it was on the way home. United found it and delivered it to my door the next day.

Before September 2001 and the idiot shoe bomber guy I would never check bags. Now I check everything and have minimal (water, newspapers, snacks) carry-on. If I know the airport has bookstores and the like past security I go through security with only the clothes on my back.

I actually worked at our little regional airport for a brief time—I started right when Northwest was having its pilot slowdown.  That was hell—my first two weeks were basically re-booking frustrated passengers at four in the morning.  Actually, that wasn’t as bad.  That early in the day, they stood a good chance of actually making it out of the airport.  It was the ones in the afternoon, when basically all the flights had left for the day, who had to spend the night, and then a frantic round of re-booking for the next day, assuming that all of those slots hadn’t been taken up by passengers who were supposed to fly out earlier.

The thing is, when there are weather delays or mechanical failures, the speed of the agent is absolutely crucial—it determines whether you get that last spot on the only flight to Kallispell, or whether that spot goes to someone else.  It’s why the trend of moving the ticket agent jobs from stable company union jobs to hourly, non-union jobs with contract companies is a bad idea, from a customer service point of view.  Unions=better paying jobs=agents stay longer=agents who know what the hell they’re doing=you have a shot at more efficient service.

Anyway, pardon tangent.  I don’t fly very frequently, and I’ve been fairly lucky.  The worst was probably sitting on a runway in Houston for an hour with no air, with a screaming baby on board.  Once we were in the air and had A/C again, the poor kid quieted down.  The most frustrating was sitting on the runway for four hours at JFK—weather delays all up and down the eastern seaboard.  Fortunately, the flight attendants were great, and we were on a flight that had free food (Sun Country), so they just passed out the food and rolled the beverage cart around until we could go.  The passengers, while frustrated, kept in pretty good humor, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

OK, I was monitoring the Accuweather metro radar picture—the one that’s zoomed in close on the Chicago area—today. In the 10 a.m. to noonish storm period, the radar was PINK. It goes from green to yellow to orange to red to dark red to pink to purple to violet. Just north of the city it was PURPLE. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be in a plane trying to land in weather like that. Trees uprooted, strong winds, torrential rains. A thunderstorm downdraft hitting an airplane could be catastrophic.

It was sunny in the afternoon before the evening thunderstorms rolled in, but O’Hare has zero wiggle room when there’s bad weather. They get backed up quickly and it takes hours to get caught up.

Whenever feasible, fly into Chicago Midway. It’s smaller and more nimble, and Midway doesn’t experience the same cascade of flight cancellations when the weather is bad. It’s about the same distance (cab or El) to downtown. So unless your airline only flies to O’Hare or your destination is the O’Hare/Rosemont convention zone, try Midway.

I won’t fly US Air or Delta because of similar incidents.

On AA it took three days to cross the country, the last time I flew with them. I got to spend the night on a Coleman cot in DFW.

Southwest is the only airline that seems to care any more.

Yeah, Southwest is pretty much the best.

My United story is simple—I was flying standby, and I got bumped for a couple extra boxes of cargo.  My luggage went, though.

Lemme get this straight… They promised you a flight, and didn’t pop you ahead of the people waiting after you to go on the same flight, but later?

That’s pretty scummy.

I don’t have nightmare travel stories about AA, but I have nightmare stories about how shitty they are to long-standing employees when they buy another airline.

One of my closest friend’s father was a pilot for St. Louis based TWA for 20-something years back in 2002, and when American bought out TWA, they completely fucked all of the flight staffs who had tons of seniority with the former TWA - not only did he lose his seniority to pilots with American who had less than 2 years on the job, but when they started doing the job cuts, they went by the newly established seniority - meaning all of the former TWA pilots and attendants, no matter how long their tenure was, were the first to get the axe.

Fuck American Airlines.

I have flown transatlantic at least three times a year for the last four years and the rule I’ve learned is to avoid any US related airline.

Continental win for delaying me 23 hours with no compensation (apparently we would have got something had they delayed us by 24)
Delta were terrible and left us sat on the runway with no entertainment (if you can call what they had that) at JFK for two hours.
AA have the worst customer service I have ever encountered and the surliest staff ever,

These days I only fly BA or Virgin. I usually have to pay £50 more but I know I will get there without flipping out.

I’m flying transatlantic via Canada Air. Hoping I’m good with that.

Pam, I think where AA were clearly at fault was lack of communication: if the weather was that bad around Chicago, their staff at RDU should have been made aware of that - and there should be policies in place to compensate customers who are hanging on hoping for a plane. There’s no excuse for any airline these days claiming they don’t know about current weather - how bad it is, how long it’s likely to be bad enough, etc.

Shame that Obama doesn’t care to do some big capital investment in making the US a country with a modern high-speed railroad system. If you had the kind of trains in the US they have in China. you could have been in Chicago in 4 hours. Even if you were clunking along in a British Rail diesel, you could make the trip as an overnight - which, given comfortable enough trains, saves a hotel bill. And doesn’t shut down due to bad weather.

What a lovely story to read when I’m flying down to RDU today.

And, oh,  American. *low and profane grumbling* I usually take the train everywhere, and have flown (including today’s flight) 2 times in the last six years. But the last time I did fly, it was American, and it is my only horror story, which, reading some of the ones here, doesn’t seem so bad. (It’s also partially a Newark Airport horror story, which I’m sure 60% of the people in the Tri-State Area have.)
So I was visiting family in Rio, and then proceeding back to Boston for school. This involved connecting from Newark to the daily flight out of Miami International. The flight is late to begin with, and then we sit on the tarmac for an *hour and a half*. So I end up hauling ass down the Miami concourse, and making the connecting flight with literally 5 minutes to spare. Thus, I’m sitting in my seat as we take off, looking out the window, and realizing, “If I’m just barely making this flight, there’s no way my luggage (containing not only trip clothes, but college clothes, too) made this flight.” And after 9 hours on the plane to Rio (and about 15 hours total) I find I was right.
So, with one AA flight down to Rio per day, plus assorted corporate transit delays? Out of a 5 day trip to Rio, I spent three days without my luggage. But fortunately, we managed to hound American into a refund for the clothes I had to buy. And the returning flights from Rio to Boston were uneventful.

Regarding the danger of flying in stormy weather, I don’t think it’s mainly the danger of cruising at high altitude—though that certainly isn’t negligible! No, the critical thing is landing. That’s the most dangerous part of any flight.

Now throw in sudden gusting crosswinds, restricted or zero visibility, a wet runway. Oh, and lightning…

Taking off is the second-worst danger.

Then, for planes that managed to get off the ground but are trying to approach a destination in the middle of a storm system—even if there is a good chance the runway they are trying to reach will be reasonably clear when they get there, they are fighting contrary and shifting winds. Which can indeed unpredictably send the plane into a spinning dive, or even rip it apart. (The effect of gusts increases with the airspeed of the plane itself…) But even if they don’t actually destroy or crash the plane, they throw a monkey wrench into the schedule. (And in the air, time is fuel. Which you have a limited supply of.)

The main thing though is avoiding having to try and land a plane in the middle of a tricky, windy downpour.

Airlines can’t be faulted for refusing to put lives at risk by flying in dangerous weather. But I do fault them for not playing fair with their paying customers. If the weather becomes that bad, they should just admit they can’t do what they contracted to do and lay out options for either full refunds (indeed, with extra compensation for your inconvenience) or offering future windows of safe travel if that will suit you. If not, full compensation—no pettifogging…

I book the travel for my company, and there is a reason why we use Southwest when at all possible:  they treat their travelers well.  It’s always a struggle to find flights that are as convenient when I have to book to non-Southwest cities.

The airline I do not use unless there is no other choice is US Airways.  They stranded me in Pittsburgh a few years ago when I was handling an estate, and they’ve screwed over my company’s travelers several times.  Two of our people flat-out refuse to travel on them (one was not allowed to board because he arrived at the gate 29.5 minutes before take off and their rules state he had to be there 30 minutes before).  We haven’t had problems with American but I’ll keep this in mind for the future.

I book the travel for my company, and there is a reason why we use Southwest when at all possible:  they treat their travelers well.

Seriously?

The first time I flew through DFW on AA was on a family vacation, in August 1985; I was 14. As we landed, I noted an immense thunderstorm approaching the airport, complete with anvil top and everything. I remember thinking it was neat because I’d never seen a thunderstorm from the air before. We land smoothly, and taxi around to the airport. All of a sudden, off to the right side of the plane, we see an immense fireball. After a long delay, the pilot announces that there’s been an accident, and we’re going to stay right where we are for awhile. Almost immediately afterwards a violent thunderstorm lashes the airport, with high, gusty winds and sheets of rain. After it clears, we taxi to the gate, where the airport is a scene of milling confusion. No one seems to know exactly what has happened, only that there’s been some kind of an accident. To make things more fun, this was a connecting flight, to Denver. The passengers applauded the pilot on landing in Denver. Never heard that before.

The next morning my Dad picks up a newspaper at our hotel. The headline is something like “130 killed in Dallas crash”. It was Delta flight 191, knocked to the ground by windshear, which robbed the plane of lift so that it crashed short of the runway. Our plane landed less than five minutes before the plane that crashed.

My more recent horror story with AA was when I flew to Chicago for a one-day training session at Apple, which has a big corporate office there. My flight from MSP was supposed to leave at 6a.m. and I was going to return around 10 p.m. the same day. Unfortunately, that was the day last April where American decided they needed to recalibrate the flux capacitors on the warp drives (or something like that) on all their planes, so my flight got cancelled. Fortunately, there are lots of flights to Chicago from MSP, so I was able to reboot at 7 a.m. on United, and only missed the first 20 minutes of training. Coming back, my flight got cancelled, I booked a later flight, and that also got cancelled. I got to the airport and went out of my way to be extra-nice to the very haggard ticket agent, who got me on a United flight leaving an hour later. The AA terminal and the United terminal are very far apart, so I had to run about a mile to get to the UNited terminal. Then the security guard selected me for special screening, because if you change flight itineraries at the last minute apparently that means you’re al-Qaeda, and even though the only thing I was carrying was a bag with a laptop computer, a granola bar, and a toothbrush (in case I got stuck in Chicago) it took them a long damn time to search my bag. Then a desperate sprint through that funky tunnel in O’Hare with the flashy neon lights on the ceiling, and arrive at the gate just as the last passengers are getting on the plane.

I am convinced the only reason I got rebooked on that United flight going back was that I went out of my way to be nice to the ticket agent, who was clearly having a very bad day with close to half of AA’s flights getting cancelled.

I remember that incident, and yes, I thought the Southwest attendant who removed Kyla Ebbert from the plane behaved incorrectly.  I also remember that Southwest apologized.  Two years have passed, and I haven’t heard of anything similar.  Am I to stop booking on Southwest in perpetuity?

There’s an old insurance doctrine that every dog is allowed one free bite before a homeowner is denied a policy.  AFAIK, this was Southwest’s one free bite.  If something similar happens, of course my company will have to reconsider.  But until that time, I’m not going to punish my economists by booking them on other carriers when they specifically request Southwest.

What an awful experience! I’d write a letter detailing what you have said here to the head of AA with a cc to the Better Business Bureau. Let them know that you will not fly AA in the future and why. If lack of communication is a problem, and enough people do follow up complaints—not just at the agent—then something might get done. We can only hope.

Pam, I think where AA were clearly at fault was lack of communication: if the weather was that bad around Chicago, their staff at RDU should have been made aware of that - and there should be policies in place to compensate customers who are hanging on hoping for a plane. There’s no excuse for any airline these days claiming they don’t know about current weather - how bad it is, how long it’s likely to be bad enough, etc.

That’s what I’m talking about. It’s not as if I wanted to fly in dangerous weather. If they had told people early on that there was a strong chance the flight would be delayed a long time or canceled, they could have started rebooking hours earlier, and possibly have more passengers able to find alternative flights. They didn’t bother; the only people who went up to the counter were those who knew early on that their connecting flights were in jeopardy.

Otherwise, the rest of us were jerked along for 8 hours with bogus information that the “plane has landed in O’Hare” and “the plane is now taking off for RDU.” Clearly that didn’t happen, unless “taking off” meant it started to taxi and then ended up back at the terminal.

Two years have passed, and I haven’t heard of anything similar.

Well, there’s this, and this, and this.  I understand you’ve got to make business decisions and Southwest might very well be the best choice for your company; it’s just that “they treat their travelers well” seemed to be a bit of a sweeping generalization for an airline that’s increasingly becoming known for treating its travelers badly if they don’t like your outfit.

Last time I flew AA, I had a very similar experience to the one described in the post: Weather prevented my partner and I from completing the second leg of our trip, there was MUCH confusion and false hope about when the next plane was taking off and from where, and we had to shell out for a hotel stay in a strange city.  (God, I remember being stranded by Continental a few years ago and getting a free hotel stay and meal out of it.) 

Anyway, the kicker of that ill-fated AA flight?  My partner, a short-tempered man, was rather rude to the airline worker who was in charge of getting us rebooked on the next day’s flight.  I do not think it is a coincidence that all of our reprinted tickets - not just the next day’s flight but the two flights back home - were marked with SSSS, which meant that at every security point we were to be taken aside, patted down, and given whatever extra security measures each airport had in their bag of tricks (shoe test, airpuff test, whatever).  When I tell this story, I usually cast my partner as the villain… but still, shows you something about AA’s customer service.

Re: Southwest… I remember that fashion incident.  On the other hand, they consistently offer cheap fares to the city I travel to most often; they still offer comfort items like drinks for free; and knock-on-wood I’ve never been screwed over by them in any way, either by internal mismanagement or poorly managed external things like Weather, despite using their services between 6 and 12 times a year.  So, my personal experience is that Southwest is the only company right now that has their shit together… but I know anecdotes ain’t data.

I flew on AA in November…the last leg was DFW to Chicago. Before that, I’d flown overnight from Santiago, Chile, so I was pretty tired and wanted to just get home.

After we landed at O’Hare, they made us wait on the tarmac. For something like an hour. The claim was that there weren’t any gates available for us, despite the fact that we landed on time. There was a little bit of snow, but not enough that it should have been causing serious trouble. And it was 9 or 10 am, so there hadn’t been a lot of time for stuff to get seriously backed up. We could see gates open, but apparently they belonged to other airlines? When we finally did get to taxi to a gate, there were something like five others open in the vicinity. It was ridiculous. I have no idea what was actually going on.

I had one summer where I flew four times and each time one of the flights was seriously delayed. I have somehow never had a flight canceled, but it’s been a close thing. I have to say, in all those experiences, Southwest was by far the best—kept us better up-to-date, and provided us with little packets that included $10 coupons for any restaurant in the airport (this was at Midway) so we could get some lunch, and also coupons for something like fifty dollars off our next flight. I do always feel a bit bad about using Southwest because of that skirt incident (and can’t just blame it on the particular flight attendant, since the higher-ups didn’t denounce it when made aware), but my experiences with them have been so far above and beyond any other airline (and they’re generally so much cheaper) that I still use them when I can.

Unfortunately, it will only get worse as oil prices rise. AA has already performed the periodic 2% exercise, where every few years, some bright young analyst suggests that they can put another row of seats in a plane if they just decrease the seat pitch between existing seats by 2%. It is now down to 31 inches on some AA planes, with more to follow. The FAA wants to implement a new ATC system called ADS-B which reduces the number of ground based radars and relies instead on GPS systems on board individual aircraft broadcasting much more information about their position, altitude, and speed then they do now. They are considering requiring the entire GA fleet to adopt this system as well, which is a joke as the equipment costs more than most small airplanes are worth. I think it is a classic case of another bright young analyst suggesting that the way to reduce cost (as in reduce the number of planes flying) is to make it too expensive to fly them.

I fly nearly every week and have adopted a weird level of bemused resignation toward these things.
Last summer, I was trapped for 12 hours on an AA flight from Philly to DFW that landed in Oklahoma City due to that wonderful summer weather in Texas.
They ran out of drinks (there was, of course, no food) and wouldn’t pull to a gate to let anyone off.
There was nearly a mutiny.
That said, United is still worse. Their staff (especially at O’Hare) is uniformly rude and not at all helpful.
People may dis on USAir and they have their problems, but one of their luggage people in Dallas gave me her personal cell number after they lost my luggage for the second time in a month (this was at the height of the Iraq war and USAir was busy transporting bodies from Dover AFB so the luggage areas out of Philly tended to fill up).
All airlines tend to suck, but the attitude of the employees can make a huge difference.

Ayutokamina is on to something big here. While I sympathize with Ms. Spaulding’s frustration, the fact of the matter is the airlines are on a death watch. Crude oil prices are on the rise again (and no, it’s not due to ‘greedy’ oil companies who only control about 10% of the world supply, nor nasty speculators) and will continue to do so as we bump up against the reality that getting the stuff out of the ground is increasingly hard. Most, I suspect, naively assume that you only have to stick a pipe in the ground, and the oil bubbles up freely. Try picturing an oil-soaked brick; that’s closer to reality.

Last year’s $147/barrel price spike is just a harbinger of things to come. No airline business model can survive anything like that. They barely survive $60/barrel. So they slash customer service and charge for the sodas. I bet the airlines don’t last more than five years, then no flights anywhere. Period.

Does Southwest still have General Admission style seating like on Greyhound? That sounds absolutely horrible. Not knowing where you are going to sit until you get on the plane no thank you! I’ll give a few extra bucks to Frontier to have my seat assignment in advance.

I totally sympathize and understand that delays are a pain in the ass, and also agree that if the airline isn’t able to get you where you need to go in a timely fashion, you should get at least a partial refund. But I’m also always glad when a plane doesn’t take off in bad weather. I once missed a day of my vacation due to weather, and when they finally got us on another flight, the weather was horrible. The entire flight was terrifying. At one point, the plane lost enough altitude that everyone in the cabin actually screamed. I can only imagine what it had been like if they’d allowed us to take off the previous day. I know that flying is safe, but I think part of that has to do with the refusal to take off during bad weather. I just generally trust that if they say the weather is too bad to fly, that they’re telling the truth. It really, really sucks to miss family reunions, conferences, and days of much needed vacation, but flying in bad weather? Yikes. It’s terrifying.  But I’m afraid of flying in general.

unless “taking off” meant it started to taxi and then ended up back at the terminal.

I’m sure that’s exactly what it meant.  Then they get ‘credit’ for an on-time departure, while screwing the passengers on that plane into sitting in a hot cage on the tarmac for hours.

Storms here were horrible all day.  It’s been such a cold spring, but my flower boxes were just started to look good—I figured next weekend they’d be awesome.

Hail killed that.  I’d taken the kids to the aquarium (last free day) and luckily we made it in by 10:30, at which point my husband texted me that it was hailing at our house 8 miles north.  Took it till lunchtime to hail at the aquarium.  and those were the little storms.

The evening ones were worse.  Branches and even entire trees are blown down everywhere—including some that crushed cars.  Our power was out from 7:30 until nearly 9 pm.

The United flight might have made it out and in, but I’m not sure it was a good idea.  As for the lack of communication?  They all suck.  The only way you get treated any better is if you get “status” for flying thousands of miles with them every year.

The entire industry needs an overhaul.

As for Southwest, general admission seating rocks.  You can “check in” 24 hours before your flight and are given a group and number.  They now have lines with 5 number ranges, so that the assholes that bunch by the doors trying to jam in first have to wait for the number within their group, so there’s no more jamming or cutting.

Southwest is a ‘cut rate’ airlline that still gives you free drinks, free pretzels/chips, checks that first bag for free, and doesn’t charge you extra for a window or aisle seat.  They have become full-service b/c the ‘full service’ airlines will screw you any way they can.  You get less for a ‘full fare’ ticket on those ‘full service’ airlines.

Southwest is the only airline I’d choose to fly, given an option.

I’m ready to stop taking off my shoes, too.  Can we stop it with the security theater now that the GOP is out of power?  No shoe bombers have ever been stopped by shoe removal—>the only shoe bomber was stopped by his fellow passengers.

Dead bolting the cabin and Americans believing that hitchhikers will kill them are the only things that have made a real difference in air travel safety.  Everything else is bullshit restricting liberty in exchange for pretending we;re safer.

Making people take their shoes off is a hassle that serves no purpose whatsoever.

I’m sick and tired of “Americans” being scaredy cats.  Freedom is scary.  It comes with risks.  But the risk of a shoe bombing is so damn small in comparison to the millions of removed shoes (all while checked bags STILL aren’t all x-rayed)

My issue is the “we’ll only be delayed a short while” thing.  My sister-in-law missed a cruise because the flight from Seattle was delayed.  She spent hours getting updates like, “the plane’s leaving the previous location”, “it’s in the air,”, and “it’ll be here shortly.”  The last was when the plane had not left the other airport yet.  If they hadn’t jerked the passengers around, she could have made arrangements with the cruise line, but every time she asked, it was “just a bit longer, ma’am.”

She did learn the lessons, though - give herself more of a time buffer at her destination, and never trust the airline’s updates for accurate information.

Jetblue. Whenever I have a choice, they are who I fly with. Period.

With today’s overfull flights, open seating means you are not forced to sit next to the man-mountain—an increasingly more common airline passenger—who takes his seat and half of each adjacent one. If the SW flight looks like it’s going to be full, pick your own seatmates while waiting in the lounge—that gives you control over who sits next to you.

And I would give up all my right to wear a “Capt Jack Hoff, Master Baiter” T-shirt if it meant I would arrive at my destination the same day I left. Rain in DFW should not mean cancelling flights through ORD, and passengers stranded for two days should receive priority over those not stranded.

Southwest does give you the option of paying a higher fare or ‘priority’ seating, which means you get on at the same time as ‘people who need extra time to seat’.

The lines are ridiculous, though.  I don’t want to board first, I want to board last.  And yet, I must sign up a day in advance to board first if I’m to board at all.

I prefer Alaska.  I get a full soda (not just a sip) and a snack (not a mouthful of peanuts) and the option to buy more.  Yeah, they’ve had some maintenance problems, but they fly some long paths and have good hours to crash ratios.

I’ve never really had a problem, but I’ve also never flown east of Austin before.

I am the opposite of scared to fly; as a little kid (in the ‘60s and early 70s) I was privileged to fly quite a few times, as my Dad was in the USAF and we frequently moved across continental distances. But later, as I acquired more siblings so the ticket price for numerous kids went up, we switched to my mother taking the youngest with her while me and my first sister went with my Dad on the ground, to move the car. So I got frustrated with my lack of air time. In college in the ‘80s I was thrilled to take flights at Yuletide and summer breaks, to wherever they were each year—always on the opposite coast, and eventually in Europe. My first flight to Germany, on a Northwest plane chartered by the Air Force from St Louis to Frankfurt, was pure magic though it involved an overnight layover in St Louis—in fact because of this. I got up early, made sure to get a seat “window seat, not over the wing.” The Army corporal who made my seat reservation said nothing but to confirm this and I was happy. Then I took a shuttle bus tour of the city, went to the Arch monument, saw a quaint little church in the park grounds, visited it and found it was a centuries (well, nearly 2 centuries anyway) “basilica” that had been the cathedral of the Diocese of St Louis—back when the Spanish held the territory and the “Diocese” encompassed pretty much what would become the entire frakkin’ Louisiana Purchase. My first European cathedral and it was in the middle of North America, as I stood under the symbolic gateway!

Then I came back to the airport, boarded the plane, and they told me to turn left rather than right at the door. Turned out my early “window seat not over the wing” request had landed me a seat in the First Class section—at the very nose of the plane as this was a 747! (Since it was a military chartered flight, legally there were no “classes.” We eventually got the same food as everyone else but there were like 3 NW flight attendents for our section, with no more than 20 passengers—seated as we were in frakkin’ cushy thrones. With plenty of room to get up and wander around without disturbing a snoozing seatmate. And seats that reclined to allow actual snoozing on our 12 hour flight.)

Not that I did snooze. I generally never can sleep in a vehicle and anyway I was too jazzed; I just looked out the window a lot, tried talking to my seatmate (a scared kid from Nashville who had joined the Army for bizarre reasons; he eventually slipped me a religious tract—some kind of Hindu thing actually!) and read a good part of Moby Dick (the only part I have ever read) and a lot of Hunter Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt.

And eventually watched the moon trying to set—but it never did, it just got redder and flatter—eventually I realized this was the same thing you’d see on Venus if you could a) survive there and b) see the Sun at all—atmospheric distortion sends the light bending right around the planet and the Sun (if visible at all) would never “set” there—same thing with the moon at our altitude. Oh, I also saw Greenland—with actual green patches, due to lichen. But no aurora. Oh well. It was a totally great flight. The best ever.

Things started to go downhill a bit when I attempted to book a comparable seat on the way back. I did, but my sister hated me for doing it. Then we went through US customs in Philadelphia, where the Customs guy objected to my Hunter Thompson book in my luggage (in these pre-9/11 days all he could do was growl at me “I don’t want to see that!”) and our plane was grounded for mechanical reasons.

Since then I’ve had a number of cool flights, though never First Class seating in a 747. But I haven’t flown much since 9/11, my last flight being in 2002.

I miss flying as flying—the rush of acceleration, the lofty grandeur of hurtling along at nearly the speed of sound in the stratosphere, the surreal (though bittersweet) excitement of seeing the destination evolve from a fairyland map to real land and the touchdown that means the flight is nearly over.

But you guys are convincing me the auxiliary stuff—the asinine airline policies, the rude security, etc—are just getting worse and worse, even as the safety efforts decline and cost-cutting makes the actual experience less and less pleasant.

I guess the next long-range trip I make will be on the ground after all.

Mark Foxwell I had similar experiences but I think I am a bit older since the Air Force still allowed dependents to fly space available on military aircraft. Since my dad was often, if not always, the senior NCO on any base I would get cockpit tours and even got to sit in the pilot’s chair (autopilot on) a number of occasions. When I was young I liked the on wing seats because I could watch the props fire up. We flew in anything going our way, mostly C-130s and C-141s but also C-47s and I did get to throw up in a B-25 as a kid.

Pam, if it’s any consolation, a United 747 landed at the GARY airport.  This is the Indiana airport that has tried to open numerous times (The runway is actually too short and not stable enough for jets.)  It was diverted from O’Hare due to the weather.  They weren’t kidding this time.The local paper has the story
http://www.nwitimes.com/articles/2009/06/20/news/top/docc863cd873691dba7862575db00042e17.txt

Mark Foxwell:

You are so lucky those nose-section seats were first class. One of my worst flight experiences was some budget airline where those were the steerage seats for a flight from new york to athens with a stopover in (I think ) Dublin. And pretty much everyone else in the section had gotten soused in anticipation of getting off at the first stop (which would have worked better had there not been some holdup in the plane’s paperwork that kept us on the tarmac for 3 hours once we landed).

Probably the other one was a cross-country flight to JFK, where the customer service people tried to convince us that since Newark served the same metropolitan area, delivering our bags there constituted the end of their responsibility. But these days, every time I think we’ve found a decent airline they stick us with a 6-hour delay or lose the luggage or some other amusing trick. Rail service would be much better.

I have flown transatlantic at least three times a year for the last four years and the rule I’ve learned is to avoid any US related airline.

I just booked our Ireland/England “husband and kids tag along to a conference” junket on Aer Lingus.  We wanted something better than a stopover in Jeneralized Foul Klusterfuck that would probably add 12 unscheduled hours to the trip, so we spent the extra $65 per person to fly direct to Shannon (my ticket was booked on my corporate card, separately).

Guess what?  Kid 2 is 11 years old, and that means his ticket was substantially discounted because the euro airlines do stuff like that.  So for an extra $75 total over flying Delta to JFK and on to Dublin, we got direct flights each way (Boston to Shannon out, Dublin to Boston back).

airline travel, today, unfortunately sucks. If you gotta get there, DRIVE. And that includes trips to LA and Florida. You can listen to music in your car, even smoke if you want to.

Now, if they’d only raise the damned speed limits, so we could get there faster ...

I don’t think my amphi car will make it to Europe on one tank, Eric.

Jetblue. Whenever I have a choice, they are who I fly with. Period.

Somewhat this.  jetBlue began flying out of Richmond several years ago and for the most part I’ve had good experiences with them, but lack of communication is a problem.  Two years ago I was flying to Boston, sitting at the gate, and the flight time approached ... and passed.  No one at the gate, no announcements, anything.  Finally about forty-five minutes AFTER the flight time a JB worker casually strolls up and announces “we have a delay.”  No shit, Sherlock.  I was lucky enough that I could get a later flight, but a couple in front of me were flying cross country and were going to miss the only connecting flight.  There’s also been mechanical problems and on my last flight with them coming back from New York there was a massive delay due to alleged bad weather on the east coast ... when it was sunny and clear.  And again the flight time passed without any sort of announcement.

For a flight from Tulsa to Dallas, my fellow passengers and I were informed that the flight was delayed due to heavy thunderstorms in North Texas. Directly across from the gate was a 52 inch plasma TV with the weather radar of Texas and Oklahoma. Nothing on the radar. They lied.

I haven’t flown American since.

I have flown transatlantic at least three times a year for the last four years and the rule I’ve learned is to avoid any US related airline.

True, though there is one Iris airline that makes the U.S. counterparts seem spectacular by comparison…

Ryanair will likely soon charge its passengers for the privilege of not shitting or pissing in their pants.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7914542.stm

Rather than share my own air travel horror stories, I would recommend instead a wonderful small novel entitled “Dear American Airlines” written from the perspective of a guy who is going to miss his estranged daughter’s wedding (and a chance at redemption) while stuck in an endless delay at O’Hare. 

It’s a pretty remarkable piece of work .

A year ago I had a similar experience: http://cliobluestockingtales.blogspot.com/2008/06/american-airlines-is-number-one.html Duffi.ce to say that I will walk barefoot across country before I take American Airlines ever again.