No Longer Standing By

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Published on Friday, 15 February 2008 15:00

Written by Matt Neimeyer

So I'm home now. My flight to DC was less than successful. Partially it was my fault , I should have left more time to get to the airport. I thought it was an hour and half from home. It's actually close to two hours. So I screwed that up. But I almost made it. If I had known that the long term parking lot was full I would have gone straight to the short term parking. It would have been more expensive but I might have made the flight since I made it to the gate at 4:25 for a 4:20 flight.

Since I was already at the airport I tried to get on the 6:30 flight but that was overloaded with stand by's ahead of me. In talking with the gate attendant after I found out that I was definitely not getting on the flight she basically said it's been crazy and that they are completely sold out for some ungodly block of time.

The gate next to mine was going to Chicago and had some sort of hydraulic problem. After a while they made an announcement about connecting flights that included a trailer along the lines of "...and if you are afraid of missing your connection, and you are considering staying in Albany overnight just keep in mind that Southwest won't be able to get you to Chicago until next Tuesday because all our flights are sold out. So this flight really is your best chance."

I was also kind of shocked that in today's age of computers that the systems they use are so antiquated. Nobody knew what connecting flights would be missed or delayed or held for the passengers from Albany. (They did announce that as long as they got off the ground by 6:40 then Chicago would be able to hold ALL connecting flights. So all was good...) It seems like it would be trivial these days to "ripple" delays through the computers of the air traffic system. I mean... really... we have software the routes Internet traffic, we have software that reconfigures traffic lights patterns in huge multi-block arrangements to maximize flow...