My Return Trip From Hell

I started to leave Las Cruces for LA on Thursday evening. I got back last night.

I missed my flight on American Thursday night by not allowing enough time to get to the airport in El Paso. They put me on standby for a flight at 6:15 the next morning, so I kept my rental and got a room a couple miles away.

I got to the airport, but the flight to LA (via Phoenix) was full. My next opportunity was a non-stop to LA at noon, but also standby. This was all complicated by the fact that an early-morning Dallas flight had been delayed due to mechanical issues (brakes) and it was a nightmare for the agents to reroute people while they dealt with the issue. I was in a long line with Dallas people, and in front of a couple heading to New Orleans. But I did get my standby opportunity, and spent the morning working on my laptop.

At noon, the board for the flight was down, and there were no standbys listed. I was told to wait, but once again, it was a full flight (including Garrett Reisman of SpaceX).

My next chance was another one through Phoenix, at 2:45, also overbooked. I missed that one too, but as soon as I did, I went over to the agent who had switched me to that one, and just asked her if I could get to Dallas (the next chance out of ELP was the flight that I’d missed first thing in the morning, though this time I would have been confirmed). I figured that once I was in Dallas, I’d have a lot more options. Fortunately (this is about 3 PM), the Dallas flight that had been delayed since early morning had finally gotten its brakes fixed, and was about to depart. Because they’d rerouted people, it had a few empty seats. The one they issued me, by bizarre coincidence, ended up being between the couple heading to New Orleans that had been behind me in line hours earlier.

My confirmed flight to LA from Dallas was at 10:10 PM, to arrive about 11 in LA, meaning about a four-hour layover. When I got into Dallas, I looked at the board, and saw another flight leaving from another terminal in about ten minutes, so I took the tram over. But it was overbooked. I went to look for another agent who wasn’t busy boarding a plane, and asked him if I could get out earlier than the 10:10 (there was an 8:45 on the board). He looked, and said, how about 7:30? I told him, sure, but I didn’t know there was a 7:30. He told me that it was a 4:20 that had had mechanical issues, but would be ready to go. I asked him for a window seat, and he said sure, and gave me a pass, with priority boarding (sweet).

Turns out that it was a 767 that they’d brought in to replace a 737 that they couldn’t fix, so it had lots of empty seats. As a bonus (which believe me, I hadn’t asked for), they put a cute nursing student from TCU on a weekend visit to her sister in LA next to me (though I later suggested that she take the empty row behind, when she wanted to study but the woman in front of her put the seat back).

So thanks to maintenance issues with American, my day that had started out disastrously ended up on a run of good luck. I got into LA about 8:30, after flying about 2800 miles to get 800, and was beat, but I’m recuperating this morning.

25 thoughts on “My Return Trip From Hell”

  1. Condolences. It’s been a long time since I’ve had something like that happen, but I’ve been through the drill a few times. My wife and I were once stuck in Oakland Airport for 13 hours or so due to (IIRC) an initial mechanical problem with our morning flight, then the same kind of cascading build-up of people trying to stand by and make connections. And I recall at least one unplanned overnight stay in a hotel at Houston Intercontinental (sans luggage), either going down to or coming back from Cozumel (via Cancun) for a Macworld editorial offsite. There’s a special kind of psychic enervation that happens with in-transit delays like that. Glad you made it home eventually. 🙂

  2. Maybe you should rethink your goal of making space travel just as convenient as air travel. ^_^

    1. Look at what the private visitors to the ISS have had to go through. Six months in Russia, learn a new language, full physicals… and even after all that, there’s still no guarantee of getting on a flight – ask Lance Bass.

  3. Yipes.

    Sorry that happened, Rand. Good thinking on going to Dallas for more options.

    I’ve gotten to the point where I hate air travel (especially airports) so much that now, when I need to go to the Oregon coast for a few weeks (like I did last month), I drive. From northern Arizona it’s close on 1500 miles each way, but I much preferred that to the flying ordeal. The first time I tried it I was surprised to find I enjoyed the drive itself; now I just vary the route a bit to see new stuff.

  4. I empathize. My most recent return trip via Steerage Airlines was nowhere near as complicated or eventful. It was simply delayed by 7 hours, due to electronic failure for which they apparently tried plan A (did you turn it off, then on again), plan B (just another hour, folks), plan C (we have a replacement part coming in on another airliner), and plan D (here’s this other airliner which we dragooned into carrying you).

    There had been a number people who were supposed to connect to a flight to Baltimore, and I think they found other means of transportation, since the flight was only about 1/3 full.

    I had the luxury of actual leg room, since I responded quickly to their request for volunteers willing to sit in the emergency over-wing exit rows.

    The trip was maybe 2.5 hours faster than driving would have been (from Denver to Houston), but it was still much cheaper (the only reason I fly Steerage).

  5. That was almost as inconvenient an air journey as Chuck Yeager getting shot down over France and having to make his way to Switzerland on foot.

  6. In the early days of aviation, they used to say, “If you have time to spare, go by air.” Those days are back again, especially since the airlines cut the number of flights.

  7. You know it’s a bad airline trip when it ends up taking longer than driving would have. Alamogordo – LA is about 850 miles – for me, that’d run about 15 hours, including stops, but then I like to keep to a sustainable pace.

    I’m with CJ. Driving is far more relaxing these days. I just spent a month driving to the east coast and back, with a whole bunch of different stops seeing family and friends. Lots of time to think, gorgeous scenery, and not once did blue-gloved mouth-breathers insist on fondling my privates.

      1. Mandatory? Never, I hope; I like driving.

        But if the self-driving capability becomes relatively cheap, near-universally available, and provably significantly safer, the time will probably come.

        Mind, absent all three of those conditions, such a mandate would be premature.

        Meanwhile, for long cross-country drives, I’d love to have a reliable autopilot. Driving over Wolf Creek Pass on a gorgeous autumn day, that I want to do myself. Across Kansas on I-70, not so much.

        1. An average of 115 Americans die every day on the road. You can kiss self driving good bye as soon as self drivers become practicable, low enough cost and a Democrat in office.

        2. I don’t think we’ll ever adopt self-driving cars because of lawyers. Every time a self-driving car screws up (or not), and there’s a dead child and the charred remains of a self-driving vehicle, a bunch of programmers are going to be grilled on the stand and the jury is going to make a billion dollar judgment against the auto-maker. There’s no other place to point the finger but at the company itself.

      1. The trick there is to already have a paid-for car with you when you arrive at the conference.

        Seriously, my drive-rather-than-fly radius at this point is around 850 miles (about the max one-day drive I’m comfortable with) for simple few-days conference trips, higher if there’s multiple destinations that’d take multiple flights and/or rental cars.

        On pure economics and time, it’d be more like 350 miles, but between the TSA gropers and the airlines squeezing all the comfort and schedule-reliability margins out, my drive-rather-than-fly number been climbing fast lately.

  8. Unfortunately I also happen to loathe driving long distances. And these days I need to make a lot of short, ~250 mile trips. Used to be non-stop flights to these destinations but no more. And over the years the prices went from very reasonable to outlandish.

    I’ll be making more and more of these short hops as the years go by. So my solution was to buy an airplane.

    Gets me there faster (even though the plane is slower than a jet), and with far less fuss but with far more fun.

    1. I’ve looked at owning an airplane a lot of times, but purely from a travel economics point of view it doesn’t make sense. And I don’t have enough money to just do it anyway for the convenience (and joy) of flying myself, alas.

      1. The only way owning the plane makes economic sense for me is that I fly acro and formation. The rent for an aerobatic-capable plane is so high that the ownership pays for itself: rent an aerobatic plane for two, one hour flights and I’ve more than paid my monthly ownership costs.

        No rentable plane is allowed to fly formation.

    1. The nearest Amtrak station would be El Paso, so it’d be a few hours on Greyhound from Alamogordo, then 17 hours on Amtrak to LA, plus from 1 to 23 hours because the Amtrak train only runs once a day.

      Couple hundred bucks (one-way) for a coach ticket, but that’s a long time to ride in coach, even if the trains are far less cramped than current airplanes. Sleeper service is two-three times more, depending.

      I wouldn’t call the train a routine alternative to either flying or driving, under the circumstances.

  9. The train might have made sense, then. Maybe.

    The problem with these airline SNAFUs is you never know at the start how long it’s going to take to sort out. They keep holding out the hope that just a few more hours and you’ll be home. The decision to take a 15-hour drive or 17-hour train ride instead is clear only in retrospect.

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