Trapped in the San Antonio Airport!
Well... I don't like air travel. I don't fit in the seats particularly well - the top of the seat hits me right about the base of my neck, and my knees hit the seat in front of me all the time. I don't like the conditioned air all that much, and I'm far too cheap to pay for first class where the seats are nicer, and the service is good enough that you don't notice much else.
But today we're on our way back from a nice little 4-day trip to San Antonio, TX and we're stuck in the airport because American Airlines is canceling flights left and right to Chicago. First, we were supposed to be on the 9:20 am flight. When we got into the check-in line we learned that that flight was already cancelled due to the FAA inspecting the plane. So they put us on the 5:40 pm flight - a joyous eight hour layover in the San Antonio airport. I was able to find WiFi for $7 a day and a plug to charge up, so I settled in for the long day of being in the airport.
The kids got a deck of cards, played a for about 3 hours, and then pulled out the PSPs and had a blast for a while. Then Liza called American to see if there were an earlier flight out and they informed her that the 5:40 pm flight was already cancelled! Their best advice at this point is to try to get on "stand-by" for the 2:30 pm flight and hope for the best.
I'm not impressed. You pay for a ticket, you get from point A to B on the date in question barring Mother Nature. Not the FAA, not something that's foreseeable. You may loose a little money, but that's your fault. That's why airline tickets are expensive. You pay to have the empty seats. You pay for the overhead. But you pay for the travel.
I can't imagine that I'll ever fly American Airlines again. I realize that I didn't make the decision in the first place - Liza did, but I'm willing to bet that she's never going to give them another dime again as well. You have to be trustworthy, and if you aren't flying when you should be flying, then you're going to loose customers - like us.
UPDATE: OK, Liza went to the ticket counter for the 3:20 pm full flight, and they booked us on Frontier Airlines to go to Denver and from there, back to Chicago. It's a crazy trip but it got us home. Late, but at least all in one piece and while they lost our baggage, they delivered it the next morning at 9:12 am, which is about as good as we can expect given their ability to move people.
While the news is playing up the grounding of all the M80 planes in American's fleet, I think it's a bit shabby to have either such a dependency on one plane, or no significant portion of those planes actually checked out, or provisional plans for dealing with the cancellations. It's a shame, really, because we'll never fly American again.