Traveling on US Airways (ugh)

August 22, 2007

Tomorrow, I’m traveling to Washington, D.C. for work, where I’ll be demonstrating a new web application to one of our customers. Our contract carrier from Providence to Washington is US Airways, which is unfortunate, because I swore I’d never buy another ticket on US Airways after my trip down to Jacksonville in May to watch my sister’s college graduation and Navy commissioning. My flight down to Jacksonville was uneventful, but the trip back up to Providence was awful.

I arrived at the airport around 7 o’clock for my 8:30 a.m. flight. When I went to check in, they told me (and the rapidly growing group of angry customers around me) that because the flight crew that would be manning this flight got in too late last night and hadn’t had their FAA-required rest period, the flight had to be delayed until their rest requirement had been met. OK, US Airways Stupid Screw-up #1: There should be back-up flight crews in the system so that when things like this happen, it doesn’t mess up all the rest of the flights that day (and probably subsequent days, since the mandatory rest periods won’t be met yet again).

I couldn’t take the later flight, because that meant I’d miss my first plane change in Charlotte. So they switched my flight to one into Washington National, leaving at 11:30. A long, long morning sitting around the terminal in Jacksonville began.

Nothing went right in Washington. Planes sat at gates indefinitely because the flight crews hadn’t shown up. Planes landing and taxiing in couldn’t get a gate because they were taken up with planes that were missing crews. Some of the people sitting around me had been waiting for their flight to Boston for hours, and there was still no sign of when it was going to leave, or even what gate it might leave from. I finally arrived in Providence around 8 o’clock, more than 13 hours after beginning a journey that required less than 3 hours of actual flight time.

The moral of the story: US Airways can’t do diddly squat right. So I sure hope I don’t get stuck in an airport someplace on either leg of this upcoming trip. At least, thankfully, I have direct flights. So I can wait out any delays without worrying about missing connections.

This is the first time I’ve traveled for work in about a year and a half, after having traveled at least several times a year for the first 5 years on the job. I leave tomorrow afternoon and come home a day later, on Friday night. I was hoping that maybe I could see a Washington Nationals game tomorrow night but they’re away in Houston this week. Maybe I can still get a tour of RFK Stadium if it’s not already closed by the time I get settled in.