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The delights of air travel

We were supposed to fly out of Santa Barbara on Thursday. New Years Day. That flight was cancelled. We rebooked for Friday. That flight was delayed for so long that we would have missed connections. We rebooked for Saturday: today. That flight was delayed beyond our connection as well. Now we’re sitting at the airport, waiting for a flight to San Francisco in time to catch a red-eye to Dulles in Washington. After that, a flight to Boston. If we arrive on time, it will be four days after we were to depart from Santa Barbara.

I have driven across the country in less time.

Part of the problem is timing. It’s winter. There’s lots of weather, and lots of weather-caused delays and cancellations. And it’s the end of a holiday season, with lots of people travelling home from trips.

And part of the problem is traveling as a family. There are only three of us, but that’s enough to exclude us from many flights that a single passenger, especially one with a high frequent flyer status, could make.

So I’m not complaining. Aviation has made the miraculous mundane. But I do regret slowing down all the work I was going to get done over the weekend. That already replaced earlier plans to go skiing with The Kid after we got back.

C’est le vol.

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Doc Searls

17 responses to “The delights of air travel”

  1. Chip Avatar
    Chip

    Best wishes, safe travel
    Did similar on way home from San Jose, but we got to “enjoy” MSP and “Mall of America” (get out of motel when it’s 45below wind chill)

    Happy New Year …
    Chip

    Reply
  2. Bali Villas Avatar
    Bali Villas

    thank you for sharing…

    Reply
  3. Instapundit » Blog Archive » DOC SEARLS on the delights of air travel. As far as I can tell, the only really significant perk of…

    […] SEARLS on the delights of air travel. As far as I can tell, the only really significant perk of being rich as opposed to […]

    Reply
  4. Joseph Avatar
    Joseph

    Next time consider driving to a nearby major airport. From Santa Barbara it’s about 100 miles to Los Angeles. From there you can get a nonstop flight to Boston.

    Reply
  5. TK Avatar
    TK

    While I’m sure it’s true that many delays and cancellations are based on the weather this time of year, it’s also true that these days airlines delay and cancel flights for any reason (including mechanical issues, staffing problems and undersold seats), then blame it on the weather whenever possible. This relieves them of any responsibility for getting you where you’re going when they said they would.

    It used to be that airlines were in the business of taking you somewhere at a certain time. Now they’re in the business of selling tickets, then doing as little for you afterward as they can get away with.

    Reply
  6. J Avatar
    J

    When the weather gets bad – as it did this weekend on the west coast – airport arrival rates decline sharply. The first flights to get cut or delayed when that happens are those operated by connection carriers. Also, those carriers in many cases aren’t certified to extremely low landing minima, so when the airport requires CAT III approaches (SFO, LAX, SNA and SAN all saw this last weekend, and SAN doesn’t have CAT III approaches) they aren’t able to fly there anyway.

    If you’re traveling to/from a location that only has connection carrier service, you should consider flying to a location that has mainline service and driving the rest of the way if it’s feasible. In this case, driving time to LAX (about 110 miles away) is only about thirty minutes longer under normal conditions than the block time of the Skywest flight United would put you on to that destination.

    I’ll bet United could’ve gotten you home out of LAX or ONT, probably on Thursday.

    Reply
  7. George Wilson Avatar
    George Wilson

    The biggest airports, with the biggest planes, with the most passengers get priority when things get dicey. Santa Barbara might have been convenient but flying from LAX might have been more reliable.

    Reply
  8. Trinidad. Adventist. Gay?! Avatar
    Trinidad. Adventist. Gay?!

    I love to travel. I also like flying a lot. My thing is not so much comfort as price. What will be the next innovation to lower ticket prices?

    Reply
  9. pchas Avatar
    pchas

    You should have taken Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner from Santa Barbara to the Burbank Airport–the train station is across the street from the airport. Plus, the trip takes you along some of the most beautiful coastline in California.

    Have a safe trip home,

    Patrick

    Reply
  10. Victor Erimita Avatar
    Victor Erimita

    Well, I think it is legitimate to complain about how much worse commercial air travel has gotten over the last two decades (much worse) and even the last few years. The reasons why are complex, but one major contributor is that we have WalMart-ized air travel. Just as the pursuit of the lowest possible price at all costs in retail has driven service out of the picture and made retail shopping such an unpleasant experience, so has the pursuit of the lowest possible ticket prices for the masses made air travel pretty much as pleasant as cross country bus travel. And this affects all levels of commercial travel. Paying more for first class may get you a bigger seat and a few amenities (though these too are far worse in domestic commercial flights than they used to be.) And some airlines allow you to pay more in coach for more leg room and so on. But the increasingly routine delays, scheduling nightmares, and so on pretty much affect all classes of passengers. And these are at least partly caused by the collapse in ticket prices that in turn resulted in lower profits, cut flights, flights cancelled because not enough people booked the flight, and much more.

    Reply
  11. David Gillies Avatar
    David Gillies

    I’ve been lucky, mostly, when flying and have only had weather make one trip longer than it should have been (Costa Rica to San Diego: should’ve been six hours, ended up fifteen). But the problem with air travel is precisely its miraculous nature. I can get to my native UK, door to door, in 26 hours, whereas up until a few years ago this would have been a matter of days or weeks. But 26 hours of constant, frenetic activity is horribly exhausting. The flying itself is the most pleasurable part of the trip. You’re sitting down, being waited on hand and foot, and unless you fly into a mountain there is nothing to worry about. The ancillary nonsense of checking in and immigration control and baggage transfer seems especially devised for maximum aggravation. I would love to sail across the Atlantic in a ship, just to avoid the desperate urgency that surrounds air travel. But I don’t have time.

    Reply
  12. Doc Searls Avatar
    Doc Searls

    Joseph, et. al., we did consider renting a car and driving to LAX or SFO, and taking Amtrak to Burbank. In fact, we explored pretty much every option. The problem was that, at the far end of those options, the available flights were oversold.

    Since we have a house in Santa Barbara, and SB is hardly a hellish place to wait around, we just went home and waited for the next booking to work out or not. Finally on Saturday we got an SBA-SFO-IAD-BOS routing that had us to BOS before noon Sunday.

    It was a redeye from SFO to IAD, but not too bad, except for when I spilled the icewater on my lap and stayed awake for the following hour.

    Coulda been worse.

    Reply
  13. Doc Searls Avatar
    Doc Searls

    George, you’re right about big west coast airports. In my experience the worst to go through is SFO, because any ground weather shuts down one runway (by law — the two main runways are <800 feet apart). For that alone it’s an awful hub. LAX, with its more widely separated runways, is better.

    Given the politics of the Bay Area, it looks like we’ll never have more widely separated runways there.

    Reply
  14. J Avatar
    J

    “Well, I think it is legitimate to complain about how much worse commercial air travel has gotten over the last two decades (much worse) and even the last few years. The reasons why are complex, but one major contributor is that we have WalMart-ized air travel”

    Trouble is, Trinidad is far more representative of the typical airline customer (his focus on price, I mean;). If price is your primary consideration, commercial air travel has gotten quite a bit better over the past two decades.

    “The ancillary nonsense of checking in and immigration control and baggage transfer seems especially devised for maximum aggravation. I would love to sail across the Atlantic in a ship, just to avoid the desperate urgency that surrounds air travel”

    If you think these things are different when you’re traveling by ship, avoid cruises that originate or terminate in a country you’re not a citizen of.

    Reply
  15. Cape Town Accommodation Avatar
    Cape Town Accommodation

    Amazing how so many flights are being ground right now at Heathrow airport. A little snow, and 650 planes grind to a halt. Will be interesting to see how Cape Town airport handles the influx of visitors coming for the FIFA World Cup 2010 South Africa. I know the Cape Town Hotels are already having a fit trying to get everything ready for the event…
    Thanks for the post, very relevant!

    Reply
  16. Aberdeen Airport Car Hire Avatar
    Aberdeen Airport Car Hire

    That was some trip with all those delays, sorry to hear about that

    Reply
  17. Jonathon Avatar
    Jonathon

    You made fantastic nice points here. I performed a search on the issue and discovered almost all peoples will agree with your blog.

    Reply

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