2004-12-03 - 10:33 p.m.

planes, planes and planes

If you're the least bit edgy about plane travel and don't want to be made more edgy, just skip this entry. Bottom line though, I'm not just reading it, I'm writing it, and I'm still going to fly. You can skip it if you want anyway - it's just one of those long rambly ones with no point that I write mostly just to write something, and people read if they're bored and need to kill a few minutes.

The plane crash in Colorado this past weekend has stuck with me. It was a small private plane, and the only reason it got enough publicity for me to hear about it was that it involved Dick Ebersol and his family. They were coming home from a Thanksgiving holiday and their plane crashed on takeoff, and one of the sons was killed, along with two of the crew. I've read all different things - first that the plane wasn't de-iced, then that no one knows yet if there was de-icing. That there may have been too much cargo weight on board. There may have been sudden strong winds. The plane left the ground briefly; it never left the ground. Someone said that though they couldn't speak for this particular instance, the root cause of the majority of crashes with small planes like this is "get-home-itis." People are in a hurry to get home, so they ignore bad weather, think they can get by without de-icing, etc.

The reason this incident really caught my eye is that the plane was taking off from the Montrose, CO airport. When I went to Colorado this summer, that was the airport closest to my destination. It's a pretty small airport, but the airlines do fly there (their small planes, but they do). I didn't end up going through there because the fares were sky high, no pun intended. I went in and out of Colorado Springs instead and drove five hours each way. But I had time and it was a beautiful drive. Anyway, even though I don't travel on the small private planes, and I didn't actually go through that airport, this story is hanging in my mind. I did drive by the airport while I was there, and think, ah, okay, there it is. Nice small airport. I actually tend to like those. However, in reading about this crash, one story said that the airport didn't have a tower that would have been able to warn them about incoming weather patterns, or something like that. Okay, that scared the living crap out of me. I was thinking, please tell me that means the tower doesn't have weather equipment or something. But no... it means the airport has NO TOWER. There's no control tower. Wtf? Obviously I'm not a pilot because apparently that's really not something to freak out over. There are close to 20,000 landings at that airport each year, and it's considered very safe. But all the air traffic keeps track of EACH OTHER by radio. No one directs the traffic. I don't know. That freaks me out a little.

Last night I was (finally) booking my flights for my January trip. I'd been watching the air fare and it went down by $30, so I figured that was about as good as it was going to get, especially as time is getting a bit short. (How the hell did it get to be December already?) So I checked the bazillion options, and found that the best one looked to be on Delta, with whom I had a really bad scheduling experience and said I wouldn't use any more. Well, when it's that or pay two and a half times the price to someone else, apparently I lose a bit of my righteous indignation.

Right before I booked the Delta flights, I checked USAir, since they're who I fly the most and therefore have the most benefits with. I was totally amazed to find a schedule flying where I wanted to go on the dates I wanted to go, for $10 less than Delta. I guess I shouldn't have been that amazed; all the airlines are pretty monkey-see, monkey-do when it comes to fares. The schedule was a little less appealing, but I know as well as anyone that all schedules are extremely approximate. Especially when you book in advance and especially when you're booking for possibly-snowy winter months, and not to mention that any and all of the airlines may have gone out of business by then anyway. So since it was a bit cheaper, and it would allow me to keep my "I won't fly Delta on principle" stubbornness alive, I decided to book that even with the later schedule.

I had chosen my flights, entered the credit card number and everything - I was in the process of choosing seats. Then the seat map for one of the flights came up. It was a 16-seater plane - eight rows, one single seat on each side of the aisle. I've been on a plane that small, but it was a long time ago, and I said I'd never do that again, too. You couldn't stand up in the aisle, and I don't mean crouching a little. I mean you got in and walked bent over at the waist to your seat, then swiveled around and sat down. I felt like I was inside a mechanical pencil. I don't recall there being a door to the cockpit at all; admittedly, this was before 2001. There was certainly no flight attendant. The pilot just yelled over his shoulder to us before we took off that if we needed anything during the flight, holler.

I looked at that and thought of the plane in Colorado (which, from what I've read, can seat 7-16 people, depending on configuration). And I just had this voice that said, no. I'm sure it would have been fine, but I thoroughly believe in listening to those little voices. As long as they don't tell me to go pillage the neighborhood, you know. So... hi, Delta. The one thing I did like about their system is you can go in and shop for better seats after you book. So if you're stuck in the middle seat, you can go check periodically and see if an aisle or a window seat has opened up. Hey, if I want to rationalize, I'll rationalize.

More air travel stories while I'm here... I read a story today about a Chicago to NY flight recently that was just plagued with non-crash disasters. They were about to take off, got a warning indicator, and had to stop and go back to the gate. I've had that happen. Once, like in this story, the plane was actually speeding down the runway all set to go, and right before we left the ground, um, NO. And we stopped. As bad as a disruption in your schedule can be, I say if the pilot sees a light that makes him not want to leave the ground, let's not leave the ground until he's happy (or she, bla bla). I believe in pilots listening to their inner self-preservation voices too. Anyway, once these people went back to the terminal, got off and then re-boarded a different plane and finally got on their way, apparently the flight was really rough (people compared it to a bad roller coaster) and a lot of passengers were sick. Then the winds were so bad at LaGuardia that they had to land at JFK.

Here's the mind blowing part. After all this (and how many people are already too late for whatever the sole reason was that they were coming to New York?), they're told to hang in there, the plane is being re-fueled and they'll get back in the air and fly over to JFK. Well apparently the passengers en masse said, NFW. We don't care if we're on the other side of New York, we're on the ground, in New York; let us the hell off the plane. God bless the one who had the balls to say it first. I don't think I would have, but damn skippy I would have come up with a respectably loud "me too" once someone else started it. According to the report I read, of the 118 passengers, TWO flew on to LaGuardia.

Anyway... all booked for my January trip, so I'm happy. I love having that to look forward to. I have a trip around the Christmas holiday too, but the family trips rush by in a whole different way. I'm so addicted to this travel stuff. Even though I've had some driving trips in the past month, I'm anxious to fly away somewhere again. I can say that after writing all of the above about plane travel... this is definitely an addiction.

my mood -

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