Recorded in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago on a rare full week in town after trips to Amsterdam and Kansas City. In this episode, an unusual flight delay makes us think about embracing the delay rather than fighting it, and snatching a couple hour vacation in Amsterdam allows us to explore some high and low culture. Listener comments include suggestions on easy-to-pack workout shoes and a question on how to make air travel greener. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file.
Every once in a while you readsomething that makes you say out loud “What was that person thinking”? Indeed, after reading more and more of these articles, I stopped commenting on them. Passenger stupidity was no longer novel. However, on my recent flight to Amsterdam, I did experience a novel level of stupidity — new to me and the entire flight crew.
It was a United Airlines 767 flying out of Chicago. The plane was full, but not jammed. I was getting settled into business class — collecting a glass of champagne from the flight attendant, finding a place to stash my pillow and blanket — when I felt and heard a bang. We hadn’t left the gate yet, so I wasn’t too worried — perhaps someone was a bit rough in hooking up the tug or closing a luggage door. However, when I heard the captain key the mike, I was less confident.
The captain had felt the same bang. He called down to the ground crew and asked them what in the heck they were doing. Only then did they tell him that one of the baggage loaders had decided to take a shortcut with his luggage cart and drive under the plane. Unfortunately, he was a poor judge of height and didn’t quite make it — hence the bang. The luggage cart hit the fuselage of the 767 hard. The captain called out Maintenance who didn’t take long to figure out that the resulting ding in the aluminum skin wasn’t going to stand up to a North Atlantic crossing. We packed up our belongings and shuffled back into O’Hare.
All the flight attendants were shaking their heads. None of them had ever had anything like this happen to them before. A few started a pool on how long it would take to fire the handler. It wasn’t a complete disaster, though — for me, that is. United ended up “re-deploying” a 767 bound for São Paulo to our flight. And, walking up to our new gate, I heard my name being called. I’d been upgraded to 1st Class to compensate for the inconvenience. So, 3 hours later, I was settling into my larger seat, collecting a better glass of champagne from the flight attendant, and listening to the captain say over the PA system “I don’t know what that guy was thinking…”
TravelCommons has moved to a new home – BoardingArea, a new portal for business travel blogs and podcasts from the people behind FlyerTalk, WebFlyer, and InsideFlyer. The move won’t change the tone or content of the podcast, nor have I signed away content ownership. For better or worse, it’s all still mine.
Instead, it’s an opportunity to increase inbound traffic and gain more subscribers by raising the profile of TravelCommons. TravelCommons has gotten completely lost in the morass that the iTunes podcast directory has become. Searching on “business travel” returns 150 results — a potpourri of language training, leisure travel and shopping podcasts, with only a handful that are really about business travel. BoardingArea answers that failing, providing a single site with 8 high-quality business travel blogs and 1 podcast. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m looking forward to expanding the audience for the conversations we’ve been having since May 2005.
I’m still shaking down the site with the BoardingArea team, so be a bit patient with me. However, as always, I appreciate any suggestions and feedback that you have — either leave a comment to this post or email me directly at comments@travelcommons.com. As as Bartles and Jaymes always said, thank you for your support.
Watching United Airlines cancel more than 600 flights at the beginning of Christmas week, I was glad that I was flying Frontier Airlines to Denver later in the week for a holiday ski vacation. The US Dept of Transportation’s latest Air Travel Consumer Report supported this feeling, showing Frontier with the lowest rate of canceled flights in November 2007. However, I was less thrilled when I found myself waiting almost an hour in Denver and O’Hare for Frontier’s luggage carousels to disgorge my family’s checked luggage.
As airlines grasp at profitability in the face of $100/barrel oil, they are tightly optimizing their cost structures. Their operations don’t have what project managers call “slack”. In this case, the spare capacity or resources to handle less-than-ideal circumstances.
United blames what they said was the worst December weather in company’s history for the incredible number of flight cancellations and delays during Christmas week. However, American and Southwest Airlines both managed to face the same weather issues at their Chicago hubs with only a handful of cancellations — United needed to cancel over 140 Chicago flights by Christmas Eve, while American dropped 11 flights and Southwest lost only 4. United’s airline pilots union says the problem wasn’t weather, it was lack of pilots. A union spokesman said, “They don’t have enough people. A little bit of a burp, and boom, they’re hammered.” United could have built in buffers — some slack — into their December crew schedules, but then would’ve lost money if the buffers weren’t needed. United gambled and it lost. Read the rest of this entry »
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