Stuck in LAX

There was a time when you could plan a weekend trip, fly somewhere and fly home in time for work on Monday. I wouldn’t recommend it now. I am hearing an increasing number of airline horror stories and they are getting ever closer to home.

The latest horror story I heard involved my niece Elizabeth this last weekend. She had long planned a trip from California to New York to visit her grandfather, whom she hadn’t seen much in recent years. The trip was carefully planned over a period of weeks.

My niece and her grandfather selected a weekend that would work for both and they planned to meet in New Jersey with other family members. They had a great weekend planned in New York, attending a couple of museums, having some nice restaurant experiences and then heading home on Sunday night.

Long story short, it was a total failure. Her plans completely collapsed and she ended up spending the night in the airport, trying to sleep on chairs designed specifically to prevent people from sleeping on them, while United Airlines kept postponing her flight a bit at a time, until finally it was so far off schedule it blew her chance to make her weekend trip entirely.

Elizabeth had booked United’s flight 867 out of Los Angeles to Newark. She flew from her home in Santa Barbara to L.A. to catch the red eye flight scheduled to leave at 11:55 p.m. on Friday night and arrive in Newark at 8:08 a.m. Saturday. She planned to spend Saturday and early Sunday with family and then return on Sunday night. But something went wrong.

An announcement came over the loudspeaker saying that the flight’s departure was postponed until 2 a.m. Elizabeth was not sure what the reason was. She heard people saying it was a maintenance issue. Others said it was a problem with assembling the crew.

So she waited.

Then another announcement pushed the departure to 3 a.m. Later it was pushed forward to 4 a.m. She continued to wait in her chair as the flight time kept inching forward. She tried to rest, but the chairs were dreadfully uncomfortable, the lights were bright and loud music was playing.

The airline pushed the flight forward again to 4:45. This continued until the Friday night flight was pushed to 10 a.m. Saturday. That would have gotten Elizabeth to Newark at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday evening. Then after getting picked up at the airport she might have gotten to her destination by 8 p.m. or so. It would be a red-eye flight all right, but flying in the daytime.

With a return trip planned the next evening at about 5:30 p.m. (good luck on that one), it became pointless to even try.

Exhausted from spending the night uncomfortably in the airport while United kept changing its plans, Elizabeth wanted to return home to Santa Barbara. That proved to be difficult, too. She would have had to wait till 11 a.m. to catch the return flight to Santa Barbara.

When she asked the attendant if she could just take a shuttle so she could get moving, he told her she probably would not be able to get a refund for the botched flight if she did that. As it was, to get a refund she would have to apply on the United website and then hope for the best.

She did not understand everything they told her. Airlinespeak is not always comprehensible to nonprofessionals. But when you’re stuck in an airport all night and your trip is blown, and then they tell you that you may not be able to get a refund, you understand well enough.

She didn’t know exactly why the flight kept being postponed inchworm-style while she was kept dangling on a string. It saved the airline the expense of putting the passengers in hotel rooms if they had told them at the outset that the flight was not leaving till the next morning at 10 a.m. instead of inching the departure time forward bit by bit.

Whether or not that was the intention, it was the result and it led to Elizabeth’s passing the night in an anxious and uncomfortable state.

As Elizabeth was relating her story to me I got a little twinge of déjà vu. Then I remembered that my daughter had virtually the same experience a couple of months before trying to fly from San Francisco to Newark.

That one was an afternoon flight, which was supposed to leave around 2. p.m. United kept inching the flight time forward. They said the plane had not yet arrived from Texas, where there was supposedly a weather issue. Finally at midnight they canceled the flight, saying that by then they had no crew.

At that point they gave the passengers vouchers for hotel rooms. But the hotel was in downtown San Francisco. They had to wait to catch shuttles into the city and couldn’t get to their rooms until 1:30 a.m.. Since they had to fly out around 8 a.m. the next morning, they barely had time to lie down before they had to turn around and head back to the airport.

They had checked their luggage so they didn’t even have their toothbrushes. In the end my daughter got home a day late and missed a day of work. She will think twice before she plans another short trip that relies on airline service.  

I can’t help but be reminded that the few surviving airlines were given antitrust immunity by Congress. That means the laws of the United States that were designed to protect citizens against the unfair practices of monopolies were suspended to allow these airlines to be, essentially, an oligopoly, a few companies dividing a market among themselves.

So they do have a responsibility to the public. They have a responsibility not to abuse the privilege of operating in a virtually competition-free environment. I'm hearing more and more of these stories and they are happening with increasing frequency to people I know.

We the people have some serious issues to consider with the airline industry.

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