Our travel delays
We're in the process of returning home to Portland from our annual visit to Lee-Anne's folks in upstate New York. We had some trouble finding flights a few months back, so we ended up booking our return travel with USAir, rather than the Delta-Northwest folks with whom we normally fly.
It hasn't worked out for us as well as we'd hoped. Our connections were booked awfully close together. The flight from Elmira to Philly was several minutes late, though they announced it as an on-time arrival. It took another fifteen minutes for them to unload our stowed carry-ons. I actually left the gate for that flight about the time the next plane was due to take off, three terminals away.
"Fortunately", the connecting flight to Phoenix was late arriving from Florida and was still unloading when we arrived at the gate. There were many standby passengers waiting, some of whom were actually waiting to go to San Diego, the final destination for that flight. The standby passengers for San Diego weren't let aboard, since apparently the leg from Phoenix to San Diego was so overbooked that those passengers would have had to get off in Phoenix and find themselves stranded until the next day. Or later.
Once aboard, we watched the first standby passenger we saw added to the plane asked to leave the plane again, for reasons that were not announced loudly enough for us to hear. He was escorted from the plane by two plain-clothes officials, whom Lee-Anne thinks were air marshals. He was of middle eastern ethnicity and was wearing a button with Arabic writing. I'm struggling not to read anything into it.
Moments after he was replaced by a new standby passenger, the flight attendants announced there would be a delay while catering supplies were loaded that were not aboard. As I'd gotten on, I'd heard the flight attendants bitching to each other as they were going through the galley that there were "no trashbags either". It sounded like the plane had not been stocked properly when it left Florida. At any rate, that delay was long enough that we finished the easier of the two crosswords in the inflight magazine -- perhaps forty-five minutes.
We arrived in Phoenix only one gate away from our connection to Portland -- a much closer run than our connection in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, we were about an hour late, and the Portland flight left about ten minutes before we finally got out of the plane. The next flight to Portland that evening was listed as cancelled. Dozens of passengers had missed connections to all sorts of destinations, and each of us was waiting in one of the multiple lines to speak to a gate agent. Evidently we'd all been booked for new flights before we arrived, but it took some time for them to get us our new boarding passes and such.
Our new booking was for two different flights on Tuesday afternoon, more than forty hours away. (We've since improved it to a flight together Tuesday morning.) There were no seats available on any airline to either Portland or Seattle for the next two days. One option was to fly to Minneapolis and take the next available flight to Portland from there -- on Thursday.
We got a hotel voucher for the night, and standby boarding passes for the next available Portland flight, 8:45 Monday morning. No meal vouchers. We were encouraged to contact customer service if we wanted to talk to someone about compensation for our inconvenience. It's pretty clear that the frontline folks are at wits end with their corporate decision makers.
Among the tidbits of information we picked up, trying to make sense of the travel chaos:
- Strong headwinds had delayed a lot of flights.
- The incident in Newark had caused further delays for a lot of Newark connections.
- USAir and Continental were canceling flights right and left.
- The rerouting of luggage at the Phoenix airport due to delays and cancellations had been going on for at least three days.
- The Fiesta Bowl and the BCS Championship game have flooded the Phoenix area with tourists.
It hasn't worked out for us as well as we'd hoped. Our connections were booked awfully close together. The flight from Elmira to Philly was several minutes late, though they announced it as an on-time arrival. It took another fifteen minutes for them to unload our stowed carry-ons. I actually left the gate for that flight about the time the next plane was due to take off, three terminals away.
"Fortunately", the connecting flight to Phoenix was late arriving from Florida and was still unloading when we arrived at the gate. There were many standby passengers waiting, some of whom were actually waiting to go to San Diego, the final destination for that flight. The standby passengers for San Diego weren't let aboard, since apparently the leg from Phoenix to San Diego was so overbooked that those passengers would have had to get off in Phoenix and find themselves stranded until the next day. Or later.
Once aboard, we watched the first standby passenger we saw added to the plane asked to leave the plane again, for reasons that were not announced loudly enough for us to hear. He was escorted from the plane by two plain-clothes officials, whom Lee-Anne thinks were air marshals. He was of middle eastern ethnicity and was wearing a button with Arabic writing. I'm struggling not to read anything into it.
Moments after he was replaced by a new standby passenger, the flight attendants announced there would be a delay while catering supplies were loaded that were not aboard. As I'd gotten on, I'd heard the flight attendants bitching to each other as they were going through the galley that there were "no trashbags either". It sounded like the plane had not been stocked properly when it left Florida. At any rate, that delay was long enough that we finished the easier of the two crosswords in the inflight magazine -- perhaps forty-five minutes.
We arrived in Phoenix only one gate away from our connection to Portland -- a much closer run than our connection in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, we were about an hour late, and the Portland flight left about ten minutes before we finally got out of the plane. The next flight to Portland that evening was listed as cancelled. Dozens of passengers had missed connections to all sorts of destinations, and each of us was waiting in one of the multiple lines to speak to a gate agent. Evidently we'd all been booked for new flights before we arrived, but it took some time for them to get us our new boarding passes and such.
Our new booking was for two different flights on Tuesday afternoon, more than forty hours away. (We've since improved it to a flight together Tuesday morning.) There were no seats available on any airline to either Portland or Seattle for the next two days. One option was to fly to Minneapolis and take the next available flight to Portland from there -- on Thursday.
We got a hotel voucher for the night, and standby boarding passes for the next available Portland flight, 8:45 Monday morning. No meal vouchers. We were encouraged to contact customer service if we wanted to talk to someone about compensation for our inconvenience. It's pretty clear that the frontline folks are at wits end with their corporate decision makers.
Among the tidbits of information we picked up, trying to make sense of the travel chaos:
- Strong headwinds had delayed a lot of flights.
- The incident in Newark had caused further delays for a lot of Newark connections.
- USAir and Continental were canceling flights right and left.
- The rerouting of luggage at the Phoenix airport due to delays and cancellations had been going on for at least three days.
- The Fiesta Bowl and the BCS Championship game have flooded the Phoenix area with tourists.