I am posting this rant (complete with profanity) as a public service in the hopes that in the future Google will pick it up to save citizens of the Madison, WI area agony and anguish in their air travels. Everyone has heard a million bad flight stories so if this is not of interest to you, please stop reading here.
Today I took a flight from the Dane County Regional Airport in Madison, WI to Dallas. It was a direct flight. It is one of the few times that I have used the DCRA and you will soon understand why.
I cannot count the number of times in the past decade that the DCRA has failed to get their first flight of the day out of the airport on time. I will admit that it is not uncommon for a flight to be late, but it becomes more of a problem when you need to make a connection. The number of cities that the DCRA serves on a direct basis is very low. They are mostly connecting cities such as Chicago/O'Hare, Milwaukee, Cincy, Minneapolis, Detroit, Memphis, Dallas and Newark. There may be one or two more.
It's just that I will be damned that they can't get that first flight of the day off the runway on time. Today's excuse was that they overbooked the flight, and that the main runway was under construction so we needed to use a shorter runway. They needed to make a calculation to see how many people/bags they could allow on the plane to make our takeoff safe. It was a CIRCUS to watch the tarmac workers have to try to get the bags of the volunteers (who took a voucher in exchange for taking the next flight) out of the belly of the plane.
So all of us cattle crammed into a shitbox Embraer commuter jet - you know - the nice one with one seat on one side and two on the other, and you have to bend over walking through it so you don't hit your head. It had the usual broken seats and ripped magazine pockets. Filthy inside and out. I put my head in my hands and vowed to try to not touch anything.
A tarmac worker, the stewardess (who was a bitch) and the captain were huddled in the cockpit (they had the door open) trying to figure it all out. No fucking computer? No calculator? There HAD to be a very simple formula for the weight of the plane (let me guess: plane weight + fuel weight + people weight + bag weight = total weight that must be below "x") but they simply couldn't get 'er done on time and we were in the air 45 minutes late. Incredible incompetence inside the terminal and out. For once the TSA was the only professional folks, very polite and quick. I would assume plenty of people missed their Dallas connections since that taxi time on the ground was huge at DFW.
The best part is that they had to know this was coming because looking at the runway under construction, there had to be 100 or so construction vehicles out there. This didn't just happen in the last hour.
I mean, it is just mind boggling that they didn't have this figured out the previous morning. We need a few volunteers to give up their seats for a voucher blah blah blah and start that a HALF HOUR before pre boarding.
This is just the latest episode in the DCRA's record of lackluster service. I have been late for flat tires, doors not being able to be shut, late flight crews, and the granddaddy of them all, the world famous "the crew has too many flight hours so we must wait until they can fly once more" routine.
To anyone reading this, save yourself some aggravation and DO NOT use the DCRA unless you like spending the day in airports or it is a direct flight that you can afford to be late arriving (as was my luck today). Your best bet is to take a bus to Milwaukee Mitchell or O'Hare and get the non stop. A great plan is to drive to one of the hotels by the Mitchell airport and stay overnight the day before. You get to park at the hotels for up to two weeks for free, and they shuttle you to and from the airport for free. Easy peasy.
Back to our regularly scheduled blogging.
9 comments:
Love flying out of Mitchell - nice, easy airport. Although I think you should mention the name of the airline because most of the problems you mention seem like more of a flight operations issue. DCRA should just be providing a place to park. Oh, and those 1+2 commuter jets are teh suck.
Agree on Mitchell and the 1 + 2. Today was American, but the airline doesn't seem to matter.
Best experience I had was being dalayed while they painted something on the tail of the plane. WTF?
Flying _in_ from OHare isn't always a barrel of laughs either. American mislaid my luggage 3 times out of 5 before I figured a way to store stuff abroad and use nothing but carry-ons.
True, they always found it again, but...
Sounds like more of an airline problem, not that the outcome is different. First flight of the day -- I'll bet the crews routinely don't arrive at work early enough to deal with unscheduled issues such as a need to rebalance the plane. IOW it's a mgmt problem, IOW it's a typical US airline.
Wait. The crews are unionized, right?
More than likely the crews, ticket agents and everyone else is unionized.
I honestly think it is an issue of the workforce of the airport, not a specific airline as I have had numerous difficulties with almost all airlines that have flown out of there.
Have been flying into and out of Madison since 1973 -- probably over 100 flights. Have never encountered anything of the sort this blogger mentions. Have even flown Embraer and never found torn seats or filth. Have had to crouch on small planes, though, but never any to match taking an 18 passenger from LaGuardia to Green in RI where passengers could look right out the front window, past the pilots, if they were interested. Clearly the blogger is inductively challenged.
Anon - you are wonderfully lucky. I am not buying it.
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