Washington Ways: December 2008 Archives

Who's happy now? Well, certainly not a lot of flyers. About one million US flyers were delayed or stranded in the days just before Christmas, when some 8,800 flights were cancelled, according to website flightstats.com. Many were in the Pacific Northwest and many, alas, were at the nation's connected-est airport, Chicago O'Hare. O'Hare delays proved that even if Chicago is no longer the nation's busiest airport, it is one with tentacles that do reach awfully far. Blame it on the weather. Snowstorms, ice, fog, and freezing temps slammed the Midwest and by Christmas Weekend, the delays had also enveloped the nation's truly busiest airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield Jackson.  We do know one person who took some cold comfort from the chaos: Kate Hanni.
The Californian realtor and founder of flyersrights.org sees the calamities as a widespread return to the bad old days of tarmac delays, the kind that set her on her crusade to begin with and the kind that set the Transportation Department to set up a tarmac delay task force. 

 

They won't give up. The Feds just will not give up on fixing LaGuardia, even though the airport operator and the airlines say that the cures proposed are as bad if not worse than the ailment. The FAA tried a slot auction at LaGuardia and the other New York City airports, but the airlines and the airports owner, the Port Authority, got a federal court to block that with a stay that puts off any possible legal resolution until next autumn. Now in the waning days of the Bush administration, the Transportation Department and its FAA say they want to persuade carriers to agree to voluntary flights cuts at the worst and most congested of the three airports, LaGuardia.

People carry all sorts of stuff with them when they fly, and when they go on along overseas trip to visit relatives, they like to bring something to remind the folks of home. So it probably shouldn't have been that much of a surprise when the Customs guys found something really bizarre in the luggage of a guy arriving at Washington's Dulles International from Central Africa: three charred monkey corpses (see below). And that wasn't all. Alerted by the sniffing of an alert aide (right), the Dulles Customs and Border Protection agents also found 10 pounds of deer meat and another 10 pounds of dried beef in the traveller's bags. The CPB did not say where the flyer was from. 

My father used to call awful, traumatic events 'learning experiences' and tell me how grateful I'd be someday for the chance to improve my life. That's sort of like telling the airlines that they should be grateful for the oil crisis that drove some good little carriers into oblivion, but in a sense, the industry here in the US perhaps should be thankful that it went through its forced diet when it did. The big broadcast network ABC News did a piece the other night in which it sort of took this line. The piece had a very smart reporter, our friend Lisa Stark, and she interviewed John Meenan from the ATA and then she spoke to Left Field. We wish we could get you a link to click on to see the piece, but here's sort of a written version with some video embedded.

Okay, let's be frank. You be earnest and I'll be frank, as they say. We don't like this guy, Chuck Schumer, but we have to give him credit: he helped JetBlue get started, pressured the FAA to keep its eye on the ball of JetBlue's application and helped ease the way between the then-nascent carrier and airport authorities. And he made sure that they served upstate cities like Rochester and Syracuse, even though he's from Brooklyn. Now, New York State's senior senator, a guy whose voice and manner both grate on a lot of us who aren't from Brooklyn, wants Southwest to begin service at New York's Stewart International Airport.
Schumer, a Democrat, says he spoke personally to Southwest chairman and chief executive Gary Kelly and urged him to start flights at the airport, about 50 miles from Manhattan's Times Square but on the west side of the Hudson river. Schumer says direct Southwest flights to its BWI semi-, mini-, sort-of-hub would be welcomed by the flying public.

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