My Airline Adventure Part 2

above: a bag of chips and a bag of sugared peanuts was all there was to eat after midnight at the Holiday Inn Express.

Traveling by plane is one of my first memories. Was I even old enough to walk? Perhaps my Dad carried me to the cockpit (which was open) and let the pilot pin a plastic pair of wings on my t-shirt. Mom played solitaire. I saw things I was just learning to identify by name - clouds, mountains, water.

When we flew over a city at night my Mom would say, "The Lights of Los Angeles," "The Lights of Honolulu," as though each city was famous for the adoption of electricity.

I also remember our flights in the early 1980s. The flight attendants were still called, "stewards," and "stewardesses." Days after the end of a labor strike, my family traveled to Hawaii.

The jet was a DC-10, wide bodied aircraft with lounges on board up a narrow, ten-rung spiral staircase.

They would inexplicably publicized as "dangerous" by the news media though statistically they were no more prone to failure than narrow bodied jets.

The planes were, however, expensive to fly.The modest protests by the otherwise powerful and well regarded airline industry seem suspicious in retrospect.

The flight attendants and maintenance workers would soon buy one of the airlines. The airline would be assailed by corporate raiders until the communal operation went bankrupt.

These were the beginnings what is now resolutely an anti-consumer, anti-worker industry.

Are consumers so easily placated by low fares? It costs about the same travel to four cities in Europe in 2010 as it did to travel to Brussels alone in 1980. Where are those rising fuel costs? That weaker dollar?

For their part, workers seem happy to keep their jobs and senority in the company. The benefits of this are less evident as retirement age approaches.

The basic thrill of flying, that motivates both of these parties, hasn't changed. Clouds, mountains, water. The sense of being "above" is powerful.

But there must be a reason, unrelated to front line workers and consumers, that the industry is weighed down by horror stories.

Every year it seems an airline is going broke, bankrupt, merging. From a business standpoint it seems as though business is never good.

It's not all those long gone packets of playing cards. Or the continuing absence of peanuts and pretzels (which would still be worth their weight, from a liability standpoint, as alcohol absorbers.)

What if it is really related to fuel and labor? What if it is old airplanes? Worn parts? Dangerous mechanical conditions?

Aren't all of these items a small part of the bottom line? A part of the bottom line consumers would pay a little bit extra for?

Do we need an expose on the price of access to airport terminals? On the salaries of top airline executives? Is this business even motivated by bad publicity anymore?

Personally, I would cheerfully accept an amount in the mid-six figure range to be an top airline executive. I would probably save lives, jobs, money, and be popular with consumers.

If I'm deemed unqualified, I'm sure airline executives in Latin American or Southeast Asian countries would happily accept a million a year, regardless of the benefit package, for the chance to transform an increasingly ugly U.S. industry.

Airline Adventure Part 1

I insisted on the shortest possible schedule to get me from San Francisco to La Fortuna.

The entire journey was to take me 20 hours.

I arrived at the airport a few hours prior to my 23:30 flight and read quietly. The leg to Miami went as scheduled arriving at 8:00 local time.

That's when the complications began.

Our 10:20 flight was bumped back to 10:40 and then 11am. We boarded sometime around 11:15.

The pilot spoke on the intercom. There would be a 30 minute delay. The jet was mising a part that needed to be replaced.

I don't know much about jets. I do know they have many parts. Since an active jet contains the lives of about 300 people, every jet part would seem essential.

So, when a second 30 minute delay was announced, I groaned but took a nap. Let the maintenance people do their business!

I awoke to the plane being evacuated. We returned to the airport and waited for another hour.

Finally, the flight was cancelled.

Two airline workers announced a new gate number. We rushed to the gate imagining each of us would be able to board the flight.

There was room for about seven. On standby.

Everyone else was ticketed for a flight that was to leave at 7pm, almost 12 hours after our arrival time at MIA.

24 consecutive hours of internet access at the Miami airport costs $8. That's about 1/4 of what I pay at home.

No one can convince me that, just because Miami has an airport, their Internet service is 600 percent more valuable than the Starbucks Wi-fi service less than a mile away. Certainly, their price structure anticipating the kind of business that evolves from 12 hour delays.

These markups seem hellbent on enhancing, rather than relieving, the misery of any journey, exploiting travelers in the process.

I purchased a days worth of access. I tried to staunch my losses.

I emailed the bus company that was to carry me to La Fortuna. It was one hour before my bus was to depart. I wouldn't be able to make it.

They replied that they could not schedule me for the next day as they were booked and that they would charge me a 100 percent no show fee. A forty dollar loss.

I emailed the couple whose resort I would be staying at. I emailed my roommates. I updated my Facebook with a picture of myself arriving smiling in Miami. "That was eight hours ago."

I approached the customer care center for the airline. They secured me a room for the night once I reached San Jose. A useful development.

Less impressively, they offered me a ten dollar meal voucher. At home, I've been able to make 10 dollars worth of food nutritiously last a week. In MIA, however, the only vegetarian meal I could purchase for ten dollars consisted of a 6" "personal" pizza, a bag of BBQ chips, and an orange soda.

I was happier than most.

The outgoing flight that lucky seven were booked on was also having mechanical problems.

After about an hour, it was taken out of service. The gate and the plane changed. That flight, originally scheduled for 13:00 finally left at 17:00.

By then, my 19:00 flight was bumped back to 19:30. Another mechanical problem. The passengers began to revolt.

A tall, frat boy type who was traveling to Costa Rica for a long weekend became the leader of the discontented, memorizing sob stories and deploying them whenever a figure of authority appeared.

I spoke to a couple from Milwaukee who were celebrating their anniversary.

"The last time we tried to celebrate our anniversary I got sick and it ruined everything, " the wife said, "I was hoping this would be different."

Another woman asked me to help her find the bus schedule online. She was nearly in tears. She hoped to be out of the country by midnight as the next day was be the first annniversary of her daughter's death.

There were quite a few older people who did not pack enough of their medications for an eleven hour layover.

Every one had a special day planned. A busy day planned. And everyone was paying long distance charges in a scramble to reschedule bookings.

If I multiply my losses times 300, I come up with a figure of about 50K. Would the airline accept that kind of one-day loss?

It was clear that the staff was doing everything in their power to cope with the distress. Airline policies did not leave them many options.

I was personally reluctant to fly an airline that grounded three planes leaving for the same destination on the same day due to mechanical difficulties.

I asked on two separate occassions to be placed on a flight to Houston, knowing that is the other common transfer point for Costa Rica.

The second man who dealt with me insinuated that I had planted a bomb on the flight when I expressed concern regarding the safety of outgoing Miami aircraft.

"What reason do you have to believe the plane will come apart over the Gulf of Mexico?"

The plane did finally board, with all engines running, at about 20:00. I arrived in San Jose two and a half hours later.

I did not make La Fortuna until 16:00 the next day.

Reviving Frequency Hopper

For the next four months, I'm reviving Frequency Hopper, the travel blog I began in 2006 to commemorate a Transatlantic cruise I took with my mother.

Presently, I'm traveling to Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Missouri, and Colorado.

My first stop is Abercam La Fortuna, a resort exclusively for gay men located in the heart of Costa Rica, as close to the active Arenal Volcano as is legally possible. I will live there for close to two months.

Unlike Delta Magnet Blog, which I've nurtured during roughly that same period, Frequency Hopper will lean more toward the plain spoken.

Travel has an implicit reward which adjectives detract from. It's an altered state without drugs or sleeplessness.

For the purposes of clarity, all times will be stated on a 24 hour clock.