First moral of this story: don’t book your travel with me. If I were a sailor, the crew would have thrown me overboard by now.
Last Sunday: watched Denzel Washington crash land a plane in “Flight”.
Last Wednesday, Dallas to Richmond. Emergency landing in Nashville, no real explanation. Fly to Atlanta with a connection to Newport News, scheduled to leave at 10 PM. Problem with the plane; crew checking it out. 11:30: have to find another plane. Midnight: got the new plane but too much fuel on board. All the seats were full; how do you build a plane that can’t carry both a full load of passengers and full load of fuel? 12:50: the crew is going to time-out in 10 minutes if we can’t get the door closed, so we stampede the plane.
3:30 AM, in bed; 45 minutes of sleep before something wakes me up and I need to be up by 6 anyway, so what the heck.
Great workshop with Virginia business officers. Delta late getting out of Newport News and storm coming into Atlanta. Not enough fuel to stack up above Atlanta, so land in somewhere called Columbus to get more fuel. Fly back to Atlanta, late for connections to Memphis; delayed by big time nasty thunderstorms. Get to Memphis after midnight.
Great weekend in Memphis with no airplanes involved.
Tuesday: flight from Atlanta to Philly delayed, I guess just on general principle.
Great workshop with Philly area business officers. US Airways: aircraft no good. Find another plane. Load up an hour late. Wait on plane for an hour for them to move the food from the old plane to the new one, which of course they could have done before we got on the plane.
Second moral of the story: Airline mergers may be necessary because of bad earnings, but they sure as heck are not good for the consumers.
Third moral of the story: I miss my Prius, which does not operate at the whims of bad planning, old aircraft, and thunderstorms!
But no planes crashed. Home.
Damn.