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Broken: Air travel in US
Jul 5, 2007
Airline travel in the US is broken. Cost-cutting airlines now run schedules with such a small margin of error that any problem, anywhere in the system, can create huge delays for passengers.
The New York Times today reports that even the official statistics don't tell the whole truth:
As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.
That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted.
The article focuses on Continental, which has its share of delays.
And about twice a month, said Rhonda Henrichsen, a Continental manager who handles missed connections, there are not enough hotel rooms in the area. The airline then drags out some of its 600 cots so passengers can bed down in the terminal.
Her co-workers call it the “Hotel Rhonda.”
Hotel Rhonda! Get it? That's... that's... a little creepy.
But still nothing as bad as the Continental poop plane... (thanks, bb)
The situation will only change, I guess, when customers are willing to pay more for airline schedules that aren't stretched to the breaking point, and for service that is at least a notch or two above surly.
HA HA! This is EXACTLY why I want to be a SATS pilot. The Small Aircraft Transportation Service is supposed to just fly people from small airport to small airport, direct flights, and no use of hubs, so no connecting flights!
basically it's a taxi service with planes.
Now all that has to happen is NASA getting it going. stupid Space Shuttle.
i have one that comes in third, but is significantly scarier. my father and i were flying to Burbank by way of DFW and it ended in the worst 24 hours of travel he or i have ever experienced.
Leg 1: BOS to DFW: we get up at 4 am to catch the flight. sit next to each other, flight normal.
Leg 2: DFW to BUR: we almost miss our flight because we were sitting at the wrong gate, sit 5 rows apart.
Leg 3: after seeing my cousin graduate from film school, and driving up to san fransisco, and staying in monterey, we get up at 4 am to catch our 10 am flight out of burbank. we arrive at 9 am after dropping of the (brand new) rental car. we check the board for our flight. it isn't there. we recheck the paperwork, and realize we were looking at the previous flight. we sit 10 rows apart on an otherwise uneventful flight.
Leg 4: DFW to BOS: due to the storm and flooding that was just clearing up, the airport is packed, and all but 2 flights on the board were delayed or canceled. we landed at 5:30 for a 7:30 flight scheduled to land in boston at 11:55. after the initial wait and first hour delay due to flight buildup, we were informed that we were delayed slightly due to an air-conditioning problem that made the back of the plane 98 degrees. after that cooled off enough, (it was still 80), we board. I am 10 rows behind my dad. we taxi to the runway, and wait. for 10 minutes. finally the pilot announces there is a problem with the flap sensors, and though he is sure the flaps are working, maintenance has to check it out. after another 10 minutes, we taxi back, and wait 5 more for the techs to show up. after a 10 minutes of what sounds like a massage chair being used on the belly of the plane, the lights quit, and aux power kicks in. after a bunch of flap moving and massaging, the aux power quits too. we now have minimal lighting, and even less air, and no air conditioning. in Dallas. during a rainstorm. in the next half hour there are a couple brief flashes of power, and then the pilot announces there was a problem with the the aux power and/or sensors (he wasn't clear, and i was tired), we had to leave the aircraft while they towed out another one. after a bit more massaging, we moved to a different gate to disembark. but the pilots communications to figure out what gate the new plane would be at tould another 20 minutes, and after the mob of angry people descended on the correct gate in the adjacent terminal, we waited another half hour to board, due to the need to replace a flight attendant that got heat exhaustion in the hour of 100 degree heat. after we finaly reboard, we fly, landing in boston at 5 am, 5 hours late. we catch a taxi home and go to bed. American has not credited us at all. as a note, all planes were McDonall-Douglass S-80's.
Got a great travel story there - Coming home from Tucson to Nashville. Had to drive in 200 miles to Tucson, AZ from the customer's office in BFE New Mexico. Spend the whole afternoon chasing down a thunderstorm into Tucson which promptly blows up the entire credit card system so I had to let Hertz fill up the gas tank. The storm also delayed my flight getting in. Well.... needless to say I get to the airport at 1. My plane lands at 2ish and they tell the boarding area that they're going to check out the plane beause apparently it dumped all of its' hydraulic fluid somewhere over the desert (I'm thinking area 51). Flights are mostly full so this is the flight plan they put me on because they eventually grounded the plane- Sat in the terminal for 7 hours after the plane lands, catch a red-eye from Tucson to Albuquerque, hour layover there, Albuquerque to Atlanta, hour layover there and then Atlanta to Nashville.
The short of it? If they'd just given me a car to drive I could have driven home from AZ faster than it took the planes to get me home...