Airline Travel and the Amusement Park Model

Apparently, airlines have decided to use amusement parks as their models of how to run airlines--into the ground. The ticket only gets you into the door and free bathrooms. Everything else costs extra.

The amusing thing about this model is that it is not amusing in amusement parks and it is certainly not amusing with the airlines. The airlines are running billions of dollars in the red and their answer to their problems is to sell you a $3.00 soft drink. Never have airport vendors had such a profitable year. Now, everyone is taking everything on board: fried chicken, soft drinks, coffee lattes, and lots and lots of bags formerly checked but now costing money to check. AA has not been joined by other airlines on the $15.00 charge for the first bag, but I can understand why they would do that. As Mike Chancellor's hands down, worst airline to fly, the $15.00 charge helps locate the bag they lost between DFW and Abilene which is a non-stop flight.

This last weekend trip went fine to Memphis. That we had to fly to St. Louis from DFW in order to get to Memphis makes no sense, but much of airlines operating policy today makes no sense. I have observed as have many others is the cheapest seats keep you in the air longer with the largest number of airports visited. Now in my world, if someone purchased a cheap ticket, I would want to get them there as soon as I could because the longer I have them, the more they cost me. That is not airline thinking(which is an oxymoron like military intelligence) Airline thinking is the cheaper the seats, the longer you keep them in the air being shuttled from airport to airport(which the last time I noticed burns valuable fuel which is why they are bazillions in the red)

Coming home from Memphis was not as fun. Perhaps it was because on the way to the airport, I made some disparaging remarks about Elvis and Graceland. One should never say ugly things about the patron saint of a city and expect to escape unscathed.

So, things went well to St. Louis. Course we were flying Northwest. At St. Louis we met up with American Airlines and the world worst planned airport with the possible except of Atlanta and Los Angeles. Going from terminal A to terminal C meant one had to leave a secure area and then re-enter through security again. The rather humorless woman who checked my boarding pass attempted to ignore me when I asked, "I thought the map in terminal A showed a secure way to get terminal C." She kept her head down and looked at my boarding pass for some reason to throw me out of the airport. I hate being ignored, so when she finished she looked up at me with that "You stupid insect" look, and I looked back at her with that "I will not move until I get a civil answer to my question." We stared each other down, and she finally cracked, "There is no way to get from one secure area to another in this airport." I replied, "Thank you." One minor victory for all the minions who fly and are treated like dirt.

When I arrived at our American gate, which is more like a holding pen than any holding pen I have ever been in, (And yes, I have been in holding pens and have the manure covered boots to show it) we joined hundreds without seats waiting on their planes of which 4/5 were late. It is an AA trademark. They are chronically late. Their pilots have a bad hair day, their planes have a bad hair day, their CEO has a bad day at work. For some reason, AA likes being late. So, most all the planes were late. When we finally boarded, this group of flight attendants had not read the memo about inflight beverage service. In fact, they had not read their memos for the last five or so years. We got pretzels and a beverage with ice. No charge.

However, when we got to Dallas, someone, a big 767 was sitting at our gate, so we decided to wait them out. It would be too much to pull into another gate (American Eagle does this with alacrity) so we sit on the tarmac until the last flight to Abilene has been scheduled to leave. They pull up to the gate, we race against hope to the gate we were told American Eagle would use. No one present. But a plane is at the gate with an engine door open. I check the monitors and sure enough, gate change for AE. We race to the gate where everyone going to Abilene is sitting quietly as the mechanic tries to fix the plane. The plane that was to depart at 8:55p.m. left at 10:00p.m. without cabin pressure and flying at 8,000 ft. at half speed. One poor misguided soul asked for a blanket. The elderly flight attendant said in her Norwegian English, "We are happy to sell you a blanket for $5.00. It comes with a nice hoody." Hoots went up through out the plane.

So we landed, I went to retrieve my one checked bag, only to find out it was not there. I went upstairs, (it is now about 11:00 p.m--arrival time was 9:45)and waited and waited to report my missing bag. The desk agent finally arrived and asked what color my bag was, and I told them it was power blue. They smiled and said, "Why, it came in on an earlier flight, we have it right here."

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