Airline misadventures

January 14, 2009 at 4:52 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

I hate it when I do that.

I just hosed myself out of about 5,000 frequent flier miles, and didn’t even realize it. And am flying into the wrong airport on a non-partner airline for my next interview, which will essentially double my transportation costs to go there. Overall I’m still under budget, but it’s annoying nonetheless because I could so easily have: a) paid the same amount and gotten miles for it, and b) done my usual diligent recon and flown into the right airport instead.

In short, I’ve gotten sloppy. And it has to stop, because I can’t afford these kind of costly travel mistakes.

There was another airplane scare on this last trip. Same airline as the last time, which also happens to be the one to which I assign all my frequent flier miles. It’s making me very uneasy, because I’ve also noticed that, in general, their planes just don’t feel as solid on takeoff and landing as they used to.

I was actually traveling on a partner airline, and got rerouted to an earlier flight through Houston because of bad weather in Minneapolis. I like both airports about equally: Minneapolis has that 24 hour wrap place, Ben and Jerry’s and an indoor walking circuit, but Houston has Pappasito’s, and is so big that you get enough exercise just walking to your connecting flight.

(And by the way, stay tuned for Travel Awards)

Anyway, when the plane took off from Houston, something just sounded wrong to me, and I was practically white-knuckling it in my comfy, automatically upgraded seat. But then we got to cruising altitude and everything seemed fine, so I just wrote it off to my being farther forward in the plane than I’m used to sitting. Service was proceeding normally, which is always a good sign.

Then, all of a sudden the flight attendants stop what they’re doing and congregate in their little galley areas. There hadn’t been any noticeable change in speed or altitude or engine noise, but then a flight attendant picks up the microphone and tells us that the captain is about to make an announcement. The captain comes on, and tells us in a deliberately nonchalant voice that one of the engines is overheating, and that we would be landing in Dallas. As we’re get closer to the airport, he informs us that there would be emergency vehicles on the runway to meet us, in case there was a fire, but that it was merely a precaution.

Then as we were landing, I noticed that it was someone else in the cockpit who made the announcement for the flight attendants to sit down for landing, rather than the captain, as usual. Which meant that it was requiring the captain’s full attention to fly the plane.

However, I certainly prefer that to “please brace yourself for landing.”

We sat on the plane for a few minutes while they figured out if the problem was small enough to fix and continue on with the original plane. Of course it wasn’t. So we got off and waited two hours for them to fly another plane out of Houston for us. Which of course precipitated the need for more crew due to FAA duty hour limits, which further delayed the delivery of the plane.

Thank God we weren’t patients on the table in the O.R. In air travel, timeliness isn’t a component of safety, so it’s OK to sacrifice that to maintain duty hour standards. In surgery, time is always of the essence. It’s not at all the same, so let’s quit using air travel as a model here.

But I digress. We got on the second plane, and on takeoff it felt even less stable than the first one had, and sounded even sicker. And I noticed that it was a full hour into the flight before the flight attendants even got up to serve beverages in first class.

And to top it off, my original flight out of Minneapolis had arrived on time in Seattle. Two hours ahead of me.