Delta passengers fall ill while stuck for hours during blistering Vegas heatwave
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Bottom line is - not going to travel for at least a year, and told my family to research places we can drive to. Flying is an absolute mess and I’m not going to do it anymore.
2 hours and 45 minutes later, I gave up. You win, United. Enjoy the $1200 from my Covid flight cancellation. I guess I figured I’d at least get to use it given that whole $50 billion bailout, but I guess you needed the money more than I did.
If you're on the east coast, consider a train instead. At least between DC and Boston, train schedules are more reliable than plane schedules, and are more comfortable than driving. (And if you're not in the US at all, I probably don't need to remind you that trains exist.)
I never had a, uh, opportunity to fly Aeroflot, but this is a lot what I imagine it must have been like.
I hate the Southwest cattle call, but it’s a no-BS consistent experience… if they happen to fly where you want to go without having to make two connections and a non-plane-change extra landing. And Delta still somehow seems to be a generally nice experience, though that only really works for me if I’m flying to one of their hubs.
Edit: But also I’ve read about that incident and I feel bad joking about it.
I maintain my original statement with regard to flight amenities, and I’ve never felt unsafe flying on a commercial airline, but I’m going to leave it at that.
Wait American airline operators still serve food?
My second biggest complaint about American airline operations is the lack of food service. Even the cheap domestic flights in China have food service. The closest thing to food I've ever experienced on an domestic American operation is the fancy bag of various things Southwest gives out on flights to Hawaii.
The worst part was rebooking at JFK for an international airline with insufficient local capacity and ground staff. And then getting the runaround on hotel reimbursements.
My understanding is that's the cause of the additional turbulence you see these days, since they glide into land rather than stepping down to avoid turbulence. I think they also have planes more tightly packed now subjecting you to more wind vortex from the other planes.
Commercial airlines don't shut off their engines and glide to land. ATC usually directs them to step down their altitude from cruise in increments until they intercept a cleared approach. Then they make a smooth, continuous descent with minor variations in power to stay on the assigned slope.
The levels were picked to provide the customers a comfortable ride, based on reports from other planes and whatever other sources they have.
They have since been told to save on fuel and so don't do this, not "gliding" but lowering the thrust to save fuel when descending which exposes people to the rougher air for longer periods of time.
Please correct my understanding if this is not the case.
That said I think there's some terminology mix up. The path of the aircraft is taking when making a landing (the slope the poster is talking about) is called the glidepath. It's got nothing to do with the engines or the aircraft type.
The stepping down might be the pattern used as the plane is being maneuvered to line up with the runway but AFAIK those are just to setup for landing rather then being a part of the actually landing itself once the controller clears the pilot land.
Which is called a "glide path" or "glide slope": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system_glid...
This does not sound coherent. Airliners consume more fuel lower down than higher up. And they definietly don’t “glide” them in the aviation sense.
Once there’s a quantifiable cost that cannot be escaped, airlines will be forced to solve the problem.
Of course they don’t have control over the weather but they do control how they react to it.
A route that regularly has multi hour delays on the tarmac due to congestion at terminal should not exist.
If the service is being offered it better be capable of being rendered.
The issue is that all these airlines are running things with much lower tolerance for variance in the system than they used to. They just don't have the resources to support that any more. Rather than lose money by being honest about what they can handle, they'll let passengers suffer. The reason is obvious: no matter how awful my experience so far, I'll continue to keep flying.
I suspect air travel will get worse until the limit case that it's so awful people start refusing to fly altogether.
Incidentally, I find flying in the EU to be far more pleasant than in the USA. Perhaps it is related.
And what can you do? I can and do write 'dem letters to my Reps and Senators. But the feeling of hopelessness can be intense with these things. Corporate priorities stressing us out and leaving us in the lurch, over and over, again and again.
You could take personal responsibility for having a medical emergency when stuck on tarmac with no air conditioning.
FlightAware says Delta 555 is usually served by a B757-200, not sure how the HVAC is laid out there, but given the power draw of HVAC systems, seems unlikely that just an APU can provide enough power to deal with 111°F (and likely higher, since the plane was on a nice hot tarmac, with heat reflection not helping matters any).
It would be interesting to know if the pilots were aware of the conditions, requested guidance from the company, and were told to conserve fuel. (This os pure speculation on my part).
Cool air on the ground is from a duct under the jetway. Once they push back, they're basically unconditioned until the main engines are at power.
My recollection is that, occasionally, there’d be a problem keeping the plane cool, and they’d ask you to power the shades and open the A/C vent (and this was generally in places like Phoenix or Vegas, so, understandable). Now I feel like this is the case on every hot weather flight, regardless of airline, even in fairly temperate climates.
I don’t know if this is a cost cutting thing, a function of modern aircraft design, or something I’ve hallucinated, but my strong impression is that the airlines have somehow managed to make sitting on the ground in a plane even more unpleasant than it used to be.
This is just inhumane.