Kelly and I were on our way back from Dad’s in Portland, and we were off to a good start. My flight was scheduled to leave at 9:11am, Kelly’s around 3pm. We arrived around 8am in plenty of time. The first problem: Kelly’s flight was too distant to allow checked bags, so she had to lug hers around with her. This created complications later.

Portland

Upon arriving at my gate, we noticed that my flight into San Francisco had been delayed until 11:30am due to bad weather at our destination. This was annoying, but as PDX has free WiFi, I didn’t complain much. I even bought Kelly a new phone on eBay. Woo hoo.

My flight eventually left at around 12:20pm, with Kelly still in PDX. This time is approximately the time my flight to Bakersfield was supposed to leave from San Francisco.

San Francisco

Upon arriving in San Francisco I made for the pseudo-gate 87A, annoyed by the fact that the next flight to Bakersfield was scheduled to leave at 6:10pm. I began waiting in line at the gate so I could get a new boarding pass, since mine was obviously no longer valid. An usher was shooing people along into the stairs down to the shuttle, seeming to speak little English, and shooed me along as well when I told her my flight was to Bakersfield. I tried to convey to her that I needed a new boarding pass, but this affected her not at all.

So I got on the shuttle, and was shuttled across the gloomy tarmac.

In the pseudo-terminal, I went up to one of the desks and got a new boarding pass and was told what I already knew: that my flight would be at 6:10pm at pseudo-gate 3. It was now about 2:30pm, and the food selection was not appealing to one who had had no lunch.

So I got on the shuttle, and was shuttled across the gloomy tarmac. Again.

I ate lunch at Firewood, an overpriced but still decent pizza place at a sort of bend-turned-bubble in the airport. At this point I was still naïve enough to believe that my morning delay would be the worst of it.

I scooped out the next arrival from PDX at gate 68, but Kelly was not there. Meanwhile, at various gates in Portland, Kelly was getting on standby lists that were as ineffective in getting her on board as a door is as a window. The next flight from PDX would arrive after my flight was scheduled to leave.

So I got on the shuttle, and was shuttled across the gloomy tarmac. Yet again.

Over the hour leading up to my third shuttle trip, I watched the departure time of my flight to Bakersfield jump to 7:30pm, then 7:40pm, then 7:50pm. After waiting near pseudo-gate 3 for a while, they announced the flight had jumped from 7:50pm into a black hole - in other words, my flight to Bakersfield was cancelled. I went up to the counter and had a talk with a woman there, who was pretty nice and sympathetic, and gave me boarding passes through LAX and meal vouchers for me and Kelly. Things were looking up in spite of the change of plans, but I now had to leave from a different gate.

So I got on the shuttle, and was shuttled across the gloomy tarmac. Part IV.

Making my way to gate 73 to meet Kelly, I watched as her arrival time went from 6:30pm to 7:00pm, and eventually she came out of the gate. I told her about the rerouting and we were on our way, but Kelly then remembered that she had to get her bag because they’d checked it not at the ticket counter but at the gate, so it was different somehow and she needed to pick it up in baggage claim. When we got to the area at baggage claim, I held her stuff so that she wouldn’t have so much to go through security with.

After reading for a few minutes, I realized that she wouldn’t get through security at all without her boarding pass, which I had with me. I asked a reluctantly helpful TSA agent who eventually directed me to a White Courtesy Telephone. I explained the situation to the paging woman, and Kelly eventually appeared at an exit where I could pass off her boarding pass, not directly, of course, but through the TSA agent, who had to stand between us and check her ID. Ridiculous. These are layers of security that do not make us truly safe. If I had actually wanted to blow up part of the airport or something, I would have made it past them easily. But since I only had a desire to do the right thing and be on my way, my progress was encumbered. It turned out that Kelly’s bag was checked through, and that she’s been misinformed: the first of many times on this trip.

We went to eat. I got Dim Sum, which turned out to be not such a hot idea because the oils made me a little sick. Not nauseous, but where you feel like your stomach acid wants to come up and say hello. Kelly got soup in a bread bowl, a better choice. We went over to gate 81 where our flight was to begin boarding at 8:16pm. Well, the plane was on time, but the crew was a few minutes late. They told us the flight crew would keep us informed of the progress along the way and make us aware of connection issues. They most emphatically did not do this.

Los Angeles

To their credit, they did assist a man who had a particularly tight connection, zero minutes, to get off first. We were made to taxi an additional 15 minutes because our gate was occupied, making our arrival time about 10:35pm. Our flight to Bakersfield was at 10:45pm, and the gates were quite a bit apart.

We ran.

But in the end it didn’t matter. There were seven of us at the gate at 10:44pm from that same flight going to Bakersfield, but they didn’t bother to hold the plane. We later found out that there were 10, perhaps even 11, people who were supposed to be on the Bakersfield flight on the one from San Francisco. The plane had left without us, and we were told to go to ticket counter 39 for reassignment.

Ticket counter 39 apparently the one that usually deals with these situations, however at the time we arrived there, about 11pm, it was closed, with nothing and no one to tell us that. We were told to get in the main ticket line, so we did. When we finally got to the front, we were presented with a choice: go to a hotel and take a morning flight, take a shuttle bus up tonight, or take a voucher for that part of the flight and go on your way. None of us were thrilled, and we all agreed that we wanted some sort of reimbursement for the delay. For me it was not because of the delay per se, but because of the preventable and poorly managed nature of it. After all, bad weather is out of our hands, but poor planning and negligence are not.

Of course the airline refused. The supervisor came out, and was actually quite friendly, but she claimed that she was not authorized to perform reimbursements of the kind we were asking. For that we would have to file a formal complaint with the main office in Chicago. When asked why the flight was not held for 10 minutes so that we could make it, they replied that they needed to examine the big picture, including connections, and especially international connections. I tried to make them realize that there were no connections going out of Bakersfield later that night, and that Bakersfield, from what I know, does not fly internationally.

And so it went. It was now 1:30am, and the airline was still vacillating over the existence of a shuttle to Bakersfield. I decided that it was not worth discovering whether this shuttle actually existed, and to just take the hotel and the morning flight.

Oh, and they had no idea where our bags might have gotten to. This part, at least, had a happy ending.

We went to the hotel, slept for three hours, and then came back. We took the flight, arrived, found our baggage without too much hassle, and went home.

Analysis

United acted extremely poorly by not better managing their flight schedules. As I suspected, there were no connecting flights leaving Bakersfield from the one arriving at 11:30pm, the one we barely missed. It’s no wonder that domestic airlines are going broke; they have no common sense and seemingly no business sense either.

Which is worse: to delay a flight by 10 minutes so that 10 connecting passengers, at least a quarter of the flight, are able to make it without causing cascading delays or to send that plane on time, but then have to put up all 10 of those people in hotels, give them refunds, and spend several man-hours to do so.

The plane is going to Bakersfield; it is a sunk cost. It does not matter (much) whether they have 0 people on it or 40 people on it, so I cannot fathom how they thought it a good idea to leave on time and piss off 10 of their customers and pay their hotel bills.

The moral of the story: avoid domestic air travel if at all possible, and if you must travel, avoid connections in SFO if there is the slightest chance of bad weather.

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