Was just checking to see when the annual Pittsburgh Air show was this year. It is fathers day weekend (June 20 and 21st).. And the feature this year, The Blue Angels will be there….. definitely worth being there for that..
Travel update
Was going back through some old posts, and noticed the last time I updated my travel map was in 2006. Hard to believe that since that time, I have done more air travel in 2 years, than I had done in the 6 coming up to it.. As of now, I have 54,586 miles done by air travel. 2008 accounted for 16,487 of that. Was just 4000 short of the fake goal I wanted of 20,000 for the year, but hey, it was for the most part a good year for travel. here is looking to the future.
USAirways and delayed flights
Yesterday I started my trip back home. I got to SFO around 11AM or so, we got the car taken car of and then on to the terminal. Everything seemed to be fine, and then we got on the plane. They started the plane’s right engine and everything seemed fine. So they pushed us out on to the taxiway and they tried to start the left engine. I knew something was wrong and I was right, so they came on and said we had to go back to the airport and have the plane looked at. They thought they knew what it was and took 15 minutes and tried it all over again. Nope, the left engine still was having problems. The problem it had was that when they went to start it, it never wanted to stop “starting”. Sort of like if you keep holding the key in the ignation and try to start a already started car engine. By now we have missed our window and was 30 minute delayed so far. The pilot came on and said that we were now delayed for an hour to see if they could fix it. Just great, we were already supposed to get back at 9:21PM, now it was going to be 10:21PM.
So about 5 minutes after we were told it would be an hour, the flight attendants starting coming through offering people water. (I already had mine, see last post.) So I declined some. I then heard them coming through offering cookies.. What they should have said was a small biscoff, (the size of a single ritz cracker). Wow 1 hour and all they gave out was a 4 oz cup of water and a 0.5oz “cookie”. We finially got to the runway about 1.45 hours after our original departure time. So up up and a way…. Everything was smooth till we got close to the east coast and hit the remenants of Hurricane Ike. We got a 80MPH tail wind which helped, but on the discent, it got quite bumpy. The one they they did do was give out free beverages to everyone on the plane because of the ‘delay’ that had happened. We ended up landing about an hour later than we were supposed to so they must have picked up the slack with the tail wind.
It took about 30 minutes for our bags to come out which just sucks as we were the only flight at the airport. So by the time I actually got out of the airport and drove the 2 hours home, I had been traveling for almost 11 hours straight.. The bed sure felt nice…
Are airline’s really making the money from selling services?
In the past month I have been across the country a couple of times to California. And have noticed some changes (I have not flown in the US for over a year, outside the US more than in the US.)
First off let me start with US Airways. They charge for EVERYTHING now. Check a bag, $15. Check 2 bags $40, check 3 bags $140. So naturally everyone tries to back as much as they can in to their carryon bags now. Which leaves less and less room in the overhead bins. So now assume that every one on a Airbus A320 checks one bag that will give them $318 more than they had before. Now doesn’t seem like that big of a deal on money wise, the probably burn up that much in fuel just taxing to the runway and the inital take off (approximatly 2 barrels of Jet A fuel). The one that gets me is that they started charging $2 for softdrinks and water on their flights. This is supposed to be one of their money generating ideas too for getting money for fuel. How cool is that, if every one on the plane did buy a single drink they would only make $162. Likely again to be burned off of the taxi from the runway. The funny thing about this is that now that they have started charging for beverages, they are probably using more fuel now than they did before.. Some people may ask why, but it is simple. If you are like me, once they started doing this I started taking a couple of 24oz bottles of water/soda on the flight with me. (You can’t go for 6 hours with out a drink..) So now if everyone is like me and does the same (some don’t but if they all did) you would now have an extra 468.4 pounds of weight on the plane. That is in addition to the soda/beverages they already pack (approx 234 pounds, 2 x 12oz cans per person estimate) that no one is going to buy.
It seems to me that it would be cheaper for them not to allow people to bring drinks on board and give the free drinks, than it would be for them to allow people to bring stuff on board and stock stuff that no one is going to use.
Now I see today that United is going to start doubling its fee for a second checked bag from $25 to $50 starting tomorrow for flights after November 1. This is only going to encourage people to try and stuff more and more in to their first checked bag. What is even more crazy is that you could conceivably pay more for your luggage to travel than you are paying for your self. Especially if you have a family. There was a family of four in front of me the other day with at least 8 suitcases (2 per person) that they were checking. On USAir that would be $160 just for your luggage to travel. If it was United, it would be $260.
I guess gone are the days of the “free” ammentities of air travel, free checked bags, free drinks, free food, free snacks.. At least for the airlines I have to fly.