A reflection on the airline industry (or, day 1)

To say that the excitement started within the first hour of our trip would be an understatement. We rounded the corner to our gate at 6:30AM Pacific Time on the 21st to find a 2 hour delay slapped onto our first flight. Thunderstorms in Dallas wouldn't be that big a deal, but we had 3 planes to catch today and all of our connections were instantly in jeapordy.

We haggled with the attendant for a while, after which she assured us that all of our connections were also delayed so we would be just fine. Intuition (aka my gut) was telling me otherwise, but we opted to take her for her word and let things play out.

Fast forward a few hours - we landed in Dallas 1 hour and 45 minutes late, rushed off the plane and were informed that our connection was leaving any second. A mad dash across the Dallas airport left us confronted by a closed gate - we had missed it by 5 minutes.

And the next flight to Chicago had been cancelled.

And there were no alternate flights to Dublin that evening.

So we waited on stand-by (with 60 others trying to get to Chicago) for the following flight and crossed our fingers. The attendant must have taken some pity on us and bumped us way up on the list - after a harrowing wait, our names were called. The next wait had begun.

We landed in Chicago "on time", which meant that if our flight to Dublin left on time, there was no way we'd catch it. We crossed our fingers again and ran across yet another airport. We were both wearing sandals, and the "flip-flop" of our feet on the tile echoed pretty amazingly - they'll surely be telling stores of our flat-footed sprints across the world's airports for years to come.

Of course, we missed the flight by 5 minutes.

Being the last flight to Dublin of the night (it was now 8PM Central Time), we had 2 options: the option the airline gave us (spend the night and next day in Chicago and try catching the next evening's flight), or the option we hoped was possible (re-route through another city). Either way we were shaving off time from our stay in Dublin, but anything was better than losing a whole 24 hours of vacation. So, we picked up the customer service phone and gave it a shot.

The attendant on the phone worked some magic and after a bit of nail biting we had ourselves booked on a flight leaving for London in just a couple of hours, with a connection that would have us in Dublin by 2PM or so. We allowed ourselves to relax a bit and patted each other on the back...way too soon.

After boarding 30 minutes late due to a "restocking issue", we proceeded to sit on the runway for one and a half hours waiting for an "electrical issue" to be resolved. Now generally I'm pretty understanding about that type of thing, but my patience was waning rapidly. There was another plane of the exact same type at the next gate over, going nowhere, doubtless in top electical condition, and meanwhile we got the "just another 30 minutes" treatment a few times.

Long story short, we finally got off the ground, but of course missed our connection in Heathrow. Our flip-flop sprinting had become an international phenomenon.

They had already booked us on a flight 2 hours later, so we did a bit more waiting. Our next flight was - you guessed it - delayed, but this one was really a bit of salt in the wound. We sat and watched as the flight scheduled after ours was boarded while ours had not yet arrived. No amount of cajoling or arguing succeeded in getting us onto that flight, and as I watched it take off, with us on the ground, in the 4th airport of the trip, after having been booked on a total of 8 flights, I took a moment to reflect on the airline industry.

I'll omit the exact words of that reflection for the sake of the faint of heart, but the bottom line is I find it hard to believe that an industry - any industry - can be such a mess. I know there are a lot of factors involved, some of which are beyond anyone's control, but I'm willing to classify that as a bullshit excuse at this point. A major overhaul may be in order.

Fast forward another 2 hours, and we land in Dublin at 6:20PM. Stepping off the plane, I realized this was all just an underappreciated effort of American Airlines at giving us a grand entrance - and a grand entrance we had. We hadn't slept, eaten a real meal or showered in a very action-packed thirty-something hours, were bleary-eyed and stunk to high hell. We stumbled down the stairs, onto the tarmac, and into the wonders of Ireland. Time for a Guiness!