Saturday, September 6, 2014

AIRLINE FEES TO FIGHT FOR

I was referred to Maddox by Ace of Spades and his referral to a Maddox video about the Fem-Spider Woman Flap. I enjoyed that little video but thought this was more appropriate. I'd be open to the idea of paying some fees that the airlines haven't yet decided to make available. The Delta one in particular. I think Southwest and Frontier should be allowed to sell that fee for punching Delta employees too.

I remember well one Delta gate agent who, in response to all questions asking about any updated information on the long delayed SFO-LAX flight that was already 4 hours late departing SFO one Sunday night, raved at any and all DELTA customers that if they weren't 50 feet away from him in 3 seconds he was calling the cops!!!! I never flew Delta again and its been over 20 years now.

It was an interesting story, as travel on Delta goes. The plane was actually there at the gate for the first 3 hours. Sitting there, waiting for its flight crew who were flying in from Wisconsin or some state like that. They were delayed and delayed by storms. No worries. There's lots of flight crews and sure enough, another flight crew showed up and stole our airplane. They were flying to Texas and since our flight crew wasn't there, Delta swapped their broken aircraft for ours and it flew away.

About two hours later, our flight crew showed up and, checked into a hotel. They had clocked out during the flight and were forced to take crew rest at which point Delta maybe, started looking around for a flight crew to replace them. They actually found one and I saw the pilot walk underneath the plane parked at our gate, come back out from under it and grab a ground staffer by the arm and drag him under. They came out about 5 minutes later and the pilot disappeared. He reappeared a moment later through the jetway door and told the copkaller that the plane would not fly. It was broken.

It took Delta 9 hours to produce a plane and flight crew for us and for the entire time they disdained us all, called the police, ignored us and only that one time when the pilot was there did they actually tell us the truth.

There was a 3rd Class Petty Officer who had duty starting 0700 Monday morning on whatever carrier it was there at North Island. She was moaning in fear as she lamented the terrible things that her Master Chief and ship were going to do to her for being AWOL and worrying about Captain's Mast. I took pity on her, as any of us would, and asked if she had permission to be out of the local area for the weekend and she did. She was on leave. I told her not to worry and said only a nuke would go crazy about an act of the DEvil LTA. I told her to call the ship and tell them what was happening and to relax. There was nothing she could do about the situation. The only other flight was sold out and gone. There were no other flights possible to San Diego until morning.

When I returned to the office in San Diego on Monday, I called in my travel guy and said no more LAX and no more DELTA or I'll be forced to shoot you. I give the Petty Officer a great deal of credit for being able to tell a very real threat from an idle one.

4 comments:

Buck said...

Your story was much more entertaining than the Maddox video. I can't believe I actually watched the whole thing.

I'm sitting here thinking and wondering if I have an airline horror story comparable to yours and nothing comes to mind. Either I was extremely lucky during my road warrior days or my memory is gone. Prolly the latter.

HMS Defiant said...

I have lots of entertaining stories about travel. Only about 90% of them involve flying on C-141s, C-5s, H-53s, and C-12s.

LL said...

More stories!!

HMS Defiant said...

It helped that my travel guy was one of our staff corpsman and had to be present whenever the staff went shooting at the range. Even as the laziest slacker on the staff who only went to the range every six months, I was far and away the best shooter when it came to .45. I owned one. I went shooting almost every week but not at navy ranges where somebody first spent an hour or two boring you to tears before letting the first group shoot. As with the physical readiness test, there were any number of officers on the staff that couldn't believe that 'fat smoking non-firing bastard' had not just lapped them on the run, but blown their doors off on the range.