Snowy day

This weekend we finally got a taste of winter in Wisconsin.  A good 4-6 inches stacked up around my house, the kids loved it.  Most of it stopped falling by Sunday night, but a quick check of the weather showed that more was supposed to be coming in the morning.  Better get up early and add some extra travel time to the airport.  The roads were fine, not big problems, a few people going under the speed limit. 

When I finally got to the airport, there was quite a line at the counter and none at security.  Didn't really look like any NWA canceled flights on the monitor.  The gate area was pretty empty, but then low an behold, the 6am flight was canceled, so they were trying to fit everyone on my flight. There was an aircraft change, so new seat assignments, all this added up to pushing back late, then some de-icing.

My connecting flight from Detroit was already showing a delay, waiting for the inbound aircraft, which was late due to scheduled crew rest.  This pushed us back some, so when I did  make it to Hartford, we were about one hour late.  Then Hertz messed up my reservation, so I had to wait in the queue to get a car.  I was behind this lady who was trying to return the car she had, with an invalid contract, seems she got in the car, drove out and no one ever compared the contract to her drivers license.   You can image how difficult it is for Hertz to try and understand and rectify this.  However, the girl at the Gold desk was very adept at helping with issues, if she didn't want to deal with it, she just sent you to the main desk rather than try and help you out.  How nice to see this is how they handle their regular customers.

Northwest Elite Lane boarding

What's up with Northwest's special red carpet for their elite lane boarding?  What a bloody waste of money, especially during these financially strapped times.  Each gate now has a red carpet, a sign and a queue divider to keep the Elite passengers from the other passengers ;)   Not that this is anything new, but it's finally gotten on my nerves as something totally stupid!  These are in place at the major hubs and the smaller airports.  Here is the best thing about them, they are never ever used!  Why?  You wonder, quite simply the make no sense for anyone.  The elite side is always the farthest from the gate agents and where their scanner is, so it becomes an impossible situation for the gate agent.  Next, the line divider isn't long enough, there are at least 16 people on each flight that could easily use this lane, and it is only 3 people long, so as queuing goes, not a very good implementation.  Add to that the fact they don't get used, so there is no seeing them used so that everyone can learn from watching.    This being said, quite a poor implementation and waste of fundage.

Here is what it would take to make these work. 

* They could double up on the ticket scanners and gate agents so that you could actually process two lines side by side, but this would be rather expensive, however with two agents assigned to each gate, you might be able to increase the level of customer service to something that was acceptable.
* You could make the lines longer, add some additional signage and more labeling on the floor (I'm a big fan of putting directions and signals on the floor for where people are supposed to stand, etc.), and then perhaps stagger the lines.  The idea behind the staggering would be to move the elite lane right next to the scanner and increase it's length, then the lane for the "others" would feed into the elite line about halfway up the line, so that when they got up to the ticket counter they would be where the elite's were, right next to the gate agent.
* You could overall increase the queue length to roughly 50-100 feet this way, you could give customers guidance on how to stand in the hallway / aisle and not block other customers who are walking from gate to gate.


If you can't find a way to make them so employees and customers want to use them because the make for a better experience, then hopefully they came with a satisfaction money back guarantee and you can recoup your poorly spent dollars!

Airstrips that even experienced pilots would consider a challenge

http://archibase.net/archinews/13712.html#

Saving Fuel

Thursday return flight home...  The fuel in Detroit is cheaper than the fuel in Green Bay, so flight ops made the grand money saving call to put enough fuel in the plane for our flight to Green Bay and the return flight back to Detroit in an effort to save money.  A grand idea if it were executed correctly.  However, the guy that puts the fuel in the plane, or perhaps the person that told him how much to put in got the numbers wrong.  They ended up putting in over 500 pounds too many, which now put the plane over it's maximum weight for landing in Green Bay.  Now comes the high tech, environmentally friendly and completely economical process of returning to a legal weight; get out of line for take off and sit on the tarmac and wait for the plane to burn the extra fuel.  This will take some time, plus we then need to get back into line for take off once again.  Talk about burning time and money.

Weary travel morning

This morning was a weary travel morning.  Last night started the first real snow fall for the Green Bay area.  The drive into the airport wasn't too bad, everyone must have been running late or stayed home, the roads were mostly empty.

The weather didn't seem to be causing any issues at the airport, other than my socks gettting wet going through security ;)

Once we got on the plane, all was fine until a little after we were supposed to be pushing back.  Finally after some arbitrary time had expired we got an update from the cockpit that the Primary radio had failed.  They were on the horn with operations and they were going to try and "reboot" the plane to get the radio / navigation back on line.  This did not work, so they were going to ring up the contracted off-site maintenance guy and have him do the all famed five minutes to swap the secondary and primary radios so that we would then be "legal" to fly.  Which we all know, it never takes just five minutes, it takes 20 minutes to do the paperwork alone.

Once that was finally fixed, we pushed back, with the warning about deicing.  However, there was one extra caveat once we go to the deicing area, we had to wait for the one and only deicing truck to finish with the other planes.  We were second or third in line.  It would be 20-30 minutes before the truck would make it to us.  Then once we got sprayed we would have to hurry up and take off before the deicing expired.

While waiting for the whole deicing process we were finally offered beverages on the RJ, quite unusual.  We were offered complementary "Adult Drinks" first thing in the morning.  Most people took coffee, a few people took them up on the "Adult Drinks". 

We finally made it to Detroit a goold couple of hours late, which now seems to be an issue for Hertz.  The voided out my reservation, so when I got to the Gold Board, my name wasn't on it; though the driver had my name in his gizmo.  I had to go into the building and find out what was going on.  The ladies at the desk were agrevated that the "system" had voided it out already and had pulled the vehicle out of the parking spot.  So we started the process over from the start. 

Once I was on the road from the airport, it was pretty smooth sailing all the way to the customer site.