wine, storms, a weekend

[indigo_rose99]

What a completely fantastic idea: Theme music. And wine. Lots of wine.

This weekend I flew to the East Coast to get together with five of my closest friends (sclatter, we missed you!). I see them every year, but had really been missing the group dynamic. Sinificant others change the dynamic, and I wanted the original. C picked me up at the airport. Before driving to Virginia to revisit our college together, we stopped off at S's house. She gave us a copy of the theme music for the weekend - those 80s songs we remember but are never played on current radio. C and I played it the whole drive across Virginia. It was great!

We rented two suites in a bed & breakfast next to our college campus. I enjoyed watching A, C, ovrclkd & D roll down the hill in front of the dining hall. S and I decided to only watch. I took racy pictures of ovrclkd. *grin* Ask her yourself.

S brought wine and lots of it. We had sleep deprivation (all), too much wine (S), philosophy, rubber duckies, and even possibly a bit of food poisoning (that would be me). It was fantastic. Sclatter, you must come next year!

As the only one who flew to this event, it is my duty to point out how painful getting home is. I am currently 31 (of 72) people on standby for the last flight out of the hub to my home. If (big "IF") I make it home tonight, it will be 5 hours later than the flight plan. They blame everything on weather. No bitter comments on a system that does not adapt to common variation (weather happens).

Comments

[aurienne.livejournal.com]

You may be interested in this guy's columns about how scheduling happens: http://dir.salon.com/topics/ask_the_pilot/

[indigo-rose99.livejournal.com]

You are right, I am interested. I read it and he talks a lot about the number of small planes, weather, and high traffic. But he doesn't talk about solutions except in the most vague way. "Scheduling." Is he suggesting using bigger planes? Is he suggesting doing fewer flights to the smaller cities? I cannot tell.

I do agree that there is a massive scheduling problem. Airlines would like to pretend that storms or canceled flights are rare events. I agree with the article, these storms and canceled flights have become commonplace. I'm not sure what the appropriate solution is, but the current system is not handling standard daily traffic At All. The slightest (and perfectly ordinary) delay on one airport or plane has massive cascading repercussions that the system is not set up to absorb or handle. It is not a flexible system or a responsive system. I completely agree that it is just a broken system.

I just feel like there are tools out there to deal with these problems. Problem solving teams of people, brainstorming creative solutions. I'm sure that passengers would be thrilled with the choice of a bus to a nearby city because their flight was canceled. Or the plane was given to another flight of people whose plane had a mechanical failure, and the truly local people were bused. Or a standard bus between airports, for those cities that have multiple airports. I would have been accepting last night if there had been a massive (even slow) bus to take me home last night. Driving myself was just miserable.

Right now it is like airports in the same area are in competition with each other, not cooperation. There is no set of plans for "what to do when we have a storm blocking our path to the south". Passengers become the enemy. With a good process, it is possible to use the same resources, but have people successfully moved from place to place. It just takes a level of creativity and flexibility that I am currently not seeing.

[aurienne.livejournal.com]

I wish I had something further to add besides "yeah!" I think people involved in the industry just get too entrenched in The System, and the pain of making small changes seems too great until they're forced to just give up and make a big change or die altogether. It would be wonderful if there were some form of cooperation (even if enforced from the outside), but I have no idea how one would make that happen. As it is, I just try to avoid flying as much as possible.