I’m scheduled to fly back to Boston tomorrow, booked on a 6:05am flight from Seattle which is supposed to connect with a 1:05pm flight from Chicago. The good news: United Airlines is doing a good job of keeping me informed. The bad news….
From: United@ualmessaging.com
To: geoff@...
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:17:33 -0600
Subject: United EasyUpdate
** UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT UPDATE MESSAGE **
The following flight time has been revised:
Flight Number: 682
Departing From: Seattle Washington (SEA)
Traveling To: Chicago O'Hare (ORD)
Date: February 17
Gate: N6 (Gate is subject to change)
Estimated Departure Time: 6:45 a.m.
followed just four minutes later by:
Estimated Departure Time: 7:15 a.m.
I have a bad feeling about this trip. Let’s check…. OK, UA is saying that UA682 should arrive at ORD at 12:43 and park at gate B7, while UA534 should be leaving at 1:05pm from gate B9. Average taxi time at ORD is about 10 minutes….
UPDATE: We pulled up to the gate in Chicago at 12:57, and I could see my connecting flight two gates over, still loading baggage. But when I reached it, the doors were closed. Fortunately, there was another ORD-BOS flight at 2:00, and it was almost empty: I got an entire exit row to myself! So now I’m back in the Boston area for a week, and rediscovering the fine art of negotiating treacherous sheets of ice. Ah yes, New England winter….
There was an unusual “bonus feature” on the SEA-ORD leg. The captain wanted to explain exactly why the flight had been delayed (the crew had got in late from Denver the night before, and needed to wait until their legally-mandated rest period was complete), so when the in-flight movie finished, he announced that he was going to give a 20-minute tutorial on air traffic control on Channel 9. A bunch of passengers toggled their FA call buttons to indicate that they were interested, so he went ahead. He did a nice job, going through the entire sequence from clearance to pushback to taxi to take-off to departure to en-route to approach, with a little bit about how airways and radio fixes work. He let us listen in to a sequence of instructions from the en-route controller and then interpreted them for us. Quite a few people seemed to enjoy it, as did I; of course I didn’t hear anything I didn’t already know, but then I’m not exactly typical….