Does American Airlines suck?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

You may know that I was in Fort Worth last week. (See this and this if you care.)

In view of the American Airlines thread in GQ, I just thought I’d share the story of my return trip.

We got on the plane about the expected take-off time, and fifteen minutes later the captain is on the PA, saying that one of our fuel gauges doesn’t work. The ground crew is going to replace a black box in the electronics bay, a fifteen minute job (note the time estimate - it gets important later).

Half an hour after that, he’s on again - they replaced the box, the gauge came up and went right down again, so they have to consult, for about fifteen minutes.

Half an hour after that, they have decided to pump out the fuel into a truck (fifteen minutes), and meter it as they pump it back in (another fifteen minutes).

Half an hour after that, he announces that our fuel truck had an accident with a catering vehicle, and they need to find us another one.

Guess how long that took.

Meanwhile, they have guys out with stepladders and dipsticks trying to measure our fuel in ALL the tanks. This involved one guy up the ladder waving the stick, one below with a big binder checking things off, and another one just hanging around (maybe he was in charge of moving the ladder).

So we finally got off the ground FOUR HOURS after we were supposed to. The captain gets on the PA and announces that now we’re in the air, our estimated flight time to Vancouver will be … (wait for it) … fifteen minutes!

We would have had a mutiny over that one if they hadn’t started passing out free drinks.

But I finally got home, and will follow the captain’s advice about writing a letter to the CEO about this disaster. Who knows, maybe they’ll send me a free ticket, or at least a discount coupon.

2

BTW, that was American Airlines!

3

I had to fly to Sacramento last month (I live in the Boston area). There are a few airports around here, so it’s common practice to check fares leaving from Providence and Manchester (New Hampshire) too. I got a little better deal out of Providence, the parking’s a bit cheaper too, and it’s only a 50 mile drive. Everyone boarded the plane and we took off okay. Then the pilot came on the intercom to tell us that the indicator for one of the leading edge slats showed that it hadn’t retracted properly after takeoff, and the co-pilot was going to come back and look out the window to see if the slat was still down or if the indicator was broken, and we shouldn’t be alarmed. He came, he saw. Then about fifteen minutes of nothing, but I noticed that we didn’t seem to be climbing like we should be. The he came on and told us that we couldn’t fly all the way with the slat down so we were going to divert to an alternate airport, Boston.