This is why I didn’t get to New York until 2AM
I’ve been here since the wee hours of Wednesday morning, though I should have arrived on Tuesday night. What was the hold-up? Oh, just some drunk woman smoking in her seat and then assaulting a flight attendant. The inbound flight from JFK was diverted to Denver, where the woman was arrested, before finally making its way to San Francisco.
I’m ashamed to say that my first thought was not, “Wow, I hope this person gets help.” My first thought was: “I wish my primary concern was for this alcoholic, but really I hope she gets the book thrown at her for being so inconsiderate and stealing so much time from me and others.”
As for JetBlue, my first inclination was to say that this wasn’t in their control. But if the woman has previously not been allowed to fly due to intoxication, and she admits that she’d been drinking before the flight…Why did they keep giving her alcohol? I know it sounds mean, but I sort of wish they didn’t let people drink on flights: A lot of travelers are plain jerks when things are delayed or they otherwise don’t get their way, and booze doesn’t make them any less insufferable. (Note: I don’t think it should be illegal to drink on a flight. I’d just be relieved to learn that airlines weren’t serving alcohol, or were enforcing a limit on on-board consumption.)
What was in JetBlue’s control was how they kept delayed passengers at SFO informed, which they did not do. People were not informed at check-in that the flight was delayed, nor did any JetBlue representative appear at the gate until more than two hours into the delay, at which point she was pounced upon by uninformed, anxious customers. (She did not come to the gate to make an announcement, and seemed baffled to be asked for information.)
If JetBlue had emailed, called or texted me to let me know about the delay, I could have stayed at the office for a full day instead of hunched over my laptop in an uncomfortable seat, working and drinking $5 bottles of airport water. (We were not offered any vouchers to tide us over through the delay before our flight. Considering that it was a five hour flight where no meals would be served - and that the plane arrived with limited snacks after they gave out much of our flight’s allocation to the disgruntled passengers on the diverted inbound - I thought that was a bit mean of them.)
Filed under: Life
What kills me is not that problems and delays occur (that’s just life), but how the airlines handle communicating them - and constantly blow it. Certainly selfish and rude on the smoking drunk lady in this case, but inexcusably selfish and rude on the part of airline, a problem I think any frequent flyer has encountered one way or another at some time or another.
We in live in an era where there are incredible easy to implement technologies and a plethora of options for instant communication; email, texting, voicemail alerts, etc. I find it really pathetic when multi-million dollar industries (airlines and like the Amy A’s bank nightmare you mention in a previous post) can’t even get the basics of communication down.
The real problem however, and this I paraphrase from a CEO in the transportation industry I saw one night on Charlie Rose, “until the airlines start seeing passengers as people and not merely as baggage to be moved from point A to B, we will continue to have major problems.”
Or, alternately you try to do what a frequent flyer between PDX and NY client of mine told me, “well, if you shift your expectations and realize you are flying in a borderline third world country somehow it all makes more sense.” Sadly, it just pisses me off more.
That’s disappointing behaviour from Jet Blue.
I would prefer alcohol free flights if the choice existed, and I imagine quite a lot of other people might do the same. Drinking in the air is dehydrating, and one feels bad enough already in airplane conditions without making it worse.
I totally agree that it’s not the delays that annoy - stuff happens, after all - but the bad way in which airlines deal with them. I got held up at Sydney airport once, when trying to fly to Wellington. Bad storms delayed the flight by a couple of hours, but the airline waited until we were finally underway before breaking it to us that there was a curfew in Wellington and they’d have to reroute our flight to Auckland (7 hours drive away). My parents were already at Wellington, wondering where the hell the flight was - there was nobody there and no communication for people meeting the flight. The airline then expected us to call and rearrange our own flights at 3am, when we landed in Auckland, and got sniffy with me when I wanted a flight to a regional airport closer to my parents’ house, rather than to Wellington. They then put us in the Worst Hotel Ever, and, to top off a great performance, when I got my bag I realised that it had been left standing in the Sydney storm and was completely soaked.
Most of the drama could have been avoided if they’d just said, ‘hey, we can’t get you to Wellington tonight. You’re all staying in a hotel in Sydney and we’ll take you first thing in the morning’. Or, you know, TOLD us what was happening so we could make our own plans…
777’s have no individual air control, you smell every exhalation of your seat mate if he has been drinking … try sitting next to some indian dude who thought curry, onions, and beer was the best breakfast to have before he flew ba to chennai … combined with the beers he had on the flight, i had to inhale it all, all the way, for nine fuc#^^% hours … will never ever ever ever fly ba again, anywhere