If you fly American enough through DFW, you are guaranteed to miss a connection. I suspect it has to do with the inclement weather that occurs there (t-storms, high winds, cold). But you think you’d make that determination before making it your hub, right?
I am in Austin and unfortunately SWA and JetBlue can’t get me to where I need to go generally. I typically have to fly American (and to a lesser extent, United - I liked them much better when it was just Continental).
This year flying American, I missed a keynote speech I was supposed to deliver because my originating flight was delayed. The connecting flight was to Texarkana and they had to know that I was supposed to be on that flight - I got to DFW about 10 minutes before it departed. I know they get fined for being late, but seriously? I also was flying out of Minneapolis that day in April where their computers went down. I will give them credit, because they had me re-routed on a United flight and I was home only one hour after I was originally scheduled to land.
I have mixed feelings every time one of these fart-knockers goes bankrupt. On the one hand, it means anybody depraved enough to invest money in one of these pieces of shit lost every penny. Hooray!
But on the other hand, the airline will continue to fly in bankruptcy, and will suck even more donkey dicks, because it’s bankrupt, and it will be the only airline serving half the places I need to go, so I’ll have to suck donkey dicks right along with it.
And thank you federal government for not allowing foreign carriers to compete on domestic air routes, so that we’re stuck with the same cycle of donkey-sucking and bankrupt domestic carriers until the end of time.
I don’t doubt your flight encountered some rough air Dio, but I would wager a large sum of money the engines did not “shut off”. If an engine had actually failed you would have known because the crew would have gone into emergency procedures beyond simply turning back.
As for this thread, unfortunately my reaction is, “what do we expect?”. I remember a few years ago hearing an aviation industry observer (might have been the same guy in the Fresh Air interview somebody mentioned) saying the airlines would eventually evolve into a two-tiered system. The top tier would be for people paying loads of money for amenities, the second would be everybody else in the modern equivalent of steerage. Welcome to the future - that’s exactly what happened, and here we are.
Bankruptcy usually doesn’t mean investors lose every penny.
The top execs of most airlines should get pushed out of their planes at 20,000 feet without a parachute - or rather with one, which, when they pull the ripcord, says “sorry, we are having mechanical problems.” I feel for the workers who are uniformly screwed.
I flew SWA from Oakland to Boston and back recently - 5 perfect segments. I bought the very reasonable early boarding, and had my choice of seats. When SWA started no food was a negative, but now it is standard. No charge for bags, of course. Their CEO basically says that their policy is to not screw over their customers, which none of the majors follow. In most cases you can rebook with no penalty fees, and when we’ve had to cancel we’ve gotten a voucher for the full amount of the flight to use later.
Notice how most other airlines don’t even pretend that flying is enjoyable, but try to sell multi $1000 seats in first class with beds, showers, and hot and cold running hookers? The rest of us they’d rather not show up.
I used to love flying 25 - 30 years ago. Now - feh. Except SWA does not piss me off, almost never, at least.
[re: thread title] Donkey leprechauns, or leprechaun donkeys? 
Usually, it does. (By investors I mean equity investors, not creditors.) The AMR shareholders got assigned a small percentage of the survivor entity, which pisses me off. On the other hand they’re still stuck owning a part of a shitty legacy airline (US Air) so hopefully it will go bankrupt again in a few years.
That kinds of sums up the state of the industry from the point of view of the consumer. Southwest stands out at the top of the heap, because they are alone in not actively demonstrating how much they detest you.
Not ironic enough. Give them literal golden parachutes.
Oh joy. Starting off my trip with a bang here. My trip uses planes with 1x2-across seating and I’m 99% sure I selected single seats during booking. So why am I stuck against the window in a 2-seat configuration? Grr.
Rick Bayless’ Tortas Frontera is making it better, but I kind of wish I’d opted for a margarita in a to-go cup now.
And now the previous flight at the gate is delayed to depart 20 minutes before the departure time of my flight (an hour from now), and 10 minutes after my flight is supposed to start boarding, but they still have my flight both at this gate and listed as “on time.” Yeah. That’ll happen. (Please just reassign it already.)
What, you don’t expect yours to be boarding simultaneously?
As for the title, donkey dicks are not supposed to be green (at least I don’t think so, I haven’t really checked). If they are green, then something is definitely wrong.
I’ve read that it’s best to take the first flight of the day, as the possibilities for delays are the lowest. Usually if one takes the first flight of the day the airplane is at the gate.
That is very true. Also the severe weather systems that disrupt flights don’t usually happen in the morning; they need the heat of the sun to build, so they tend to strike in the afternoon or early evening. First flight of the day is the one which is the most likely to leave on time, so if you REALLY need to be somewhere badly, that’s the flight to take!
The delays were leftovers from the night before as well as the front pushing through to the east. I didn’t have to be at the hotel until 7 pm, so when I booked, I figured a 3-ish arrival was plenty early…except when stuff like that happens.
My boss got it worse though - her American flight was a few hours later, got cancelled but the luggage didn’t get pulled like they claimed they would do, they flew her to Reagan Int’l so she’d arrive before midnight (the only remaining BWI option), and she rented a car and drove to the hotel. They said her luggage - containing her clothes and toiletries - would be landing at midnight and sent right to her hotel.
Yeah. More like it arrived this morning and they offered to have it at the hotel at the time she was leaving for her return flight out of BWI. She told them emphatically that they were not to do that, and apparently they followed through and didn’t. This just cemented her usual “do not check a bag” policy as she had no clean clothes for our conference today.
(Did I mention she’s an AA Platinum member?)
I go to check in at United in SFO and my reservation is not showing up on the self check in kiosks. They make we wait in line at “with bags” checking. When I get to the front I tell the person who is pointing out available kiosks, that my reservation is not showing up and they just tell me to stand in front of a kiosk and wait. Of course no one comes over to help because the system has no option for saying “Hey, I can’t pull up my reservation”. The telephone next to the kiosk does nothing. I finally have to stand behind someone who is actually being helped so that I can catch the eye of a human. They say “scan your credit card or drivers license” and I have to explain that “IT ISN"T FINDING MY RESERVATION”. They finally manage to pull up my reservation after sacrificing a goat to the system and hand me my boarding pass with no explanation or apology.
Those kiosks are great until something out of the ordinary happens. Then there seems to be no system to help.
They make it harder and more expensive to check bags, so people have more and more carry ons, and then the gate staff bitches at everyone for having too much stuff.
That’s why I like Delta’s online checkin, which you can use directly from their iPhone app. You just press a couple buttons and they send a QR code right to your phone. Then you just scan the code at the TSA desk and sail right on through. They have the same scanner at the gate so you don’t need to ever print a paper pass.
As long as your phone battery doesn’t run out, of course. 