Common Sense for the Biochemist

A little background: Back in December of last year I took a trip to the University of Arizona Microarray Workshop. I flew on Northwest and was supposed to go from Lansing to Detroit to Tuscon. However, I ended up going from Lansing to Detroit to Minneapolis, was supposed to go to Denver but missed that connection so I went to Pheonix and then to Tucson, 10 hours late and without my luggage. I won't go into all the details but lets just say that from my interactions with Northwest that day I can understand why the company is bankrupt. It is not because of high oil prices, it is because of rampant inefficiences within the system. So fast forward to this last Friday. I had to conduct some business in St. Louis and the plan was for me to fly in, be in meetings from 9:30a.m. - 2:30 p.m. and fly back to good ole' Lansing that night. It would be tight but doable as long as the United Airlines could keep their act in line. Hey, United just secured $3 billion in financing to get them out of bankruptcy so they must be doing something right? Anyway, the first leg of my journey starts at 6:00 in the morning and I make it from Lansing to Chicago no problem. I check and my flight to St. Louis is on time. Since I have a little time, I find a corner to relax and take in the latest TWIT podcast on my MP3 player. About an hour before I'm supposed to depart, I check my flight status again and my flight has been canceled - OH *$%#!. The lady at the gate says that I can't get confirmed on another flight to STL until 11:30, mind you, I have a return flight scheduled for 3:45 and I need more time than that for what I am doing. Luckily, I was able to get standby on an American flight that left about 10 minutes later and I got to STL only 10 minutes late, phew. My meetings went very well (don't want to tell you what I was doing, maybe later)but I was on my game for four and a half hours. Then it was back to the airport in time for my 3:45 flight back to Chicago. We boarded the plane a few minutes late and were ready to go when we were told we had mechanical problems. Apparently, the inbound flight was full and a passenger who had a small child just held them in their lap. However, federal regulations state that all passengers must have a floatation device, i.e. your seat cushion, so the parent was provided with a hand-held, sealed floatation device. During the flight, the kid tore open the device which made it unusable. FAA regulations mandate that every plane have one of these devices in operable order whether it is needed or not so we had to wait at the gate for 20 minutes or so while maintenance rounded one up. Mind you, this was a flight from St. Louis to Chicago, the biggest body of water we flew over was the Mississippi river. Well, we get to Chicago late, fortunately, my flight back to Lansing was late boarding so I didn't have any troubles catching it. All the passengers boarded, the door was shut, the cabin "was prepared for takeoff", and we sat there, and waited, and waited, and waited . . . There was only one ramp crew working that side of the terminal and we couldn't get a push back from the gate. It took AN HOUR to get a crew to push our plane back from the gate. Even the pilots were expressing their anger at this inefficiency to us. The flight attendant, who in my book deserves a promotion or a big raise, basically opened up the pantry and was handing out drinks, snacks, and alcohol for free. All-in-all, I was back in Lansing only an hour later than planned but man, what a day. The last two times I have flown has been nothing but pure chaos. United Airlines may be out of bankuptcy but I see nothing that shows that they will be profitable again. Cutting out those ten cent bag of pretzels is not going to save you any money when passengers are waiting for an hour to be pushed from the gate. In my opinion, the best thing to do to these bankrupt airlines is to sell them off for parts. Sometimes, you just have to start all over again and I think that is the case for the entire airline system.