Posted on 07/20/2004 11:20:08 AM PDT by EggsAckley
I hate flying. That's been the fact for quite a numbers of years. But after the events at O'Hare airport last Friday, July 16th, I vow that I will NEVER fly through that airport again, and what's more, I will NEVER EVER again fly on United Airlines. "Fly the friendly skies" my great aunt fanny! Their motto SHOULD be "We don't care, we don't have to. We're United."
On that day, dozens of planes were stuck on the tarmac, not allowed to take off. After the first hour had passed, our "friendly" pilot announced that there was a weather system holding up our takeoff. Weather? Where?
After four and a half hours of sitting on the tarmac we FINALLY departed. The explanation of "weather" was laughable; how could a weather system that no one saw hold up so many planes of so many sizes heading out for so many destinations?
I still have not been able to find out what the truth was, and I was away from computers for the subsequent four days, and had no way of researching what REALLY was going on that day. Was there a crisis at the airport? Controller shut-down? It was bad enough being trapped like sardines in that 707, with very little air, no water, and not allowed to get up and move around. What made it worse was that the crew simply didn't care how uncomfortable everyone was. It was a very unhealthy situation.
Anybody got any ideas?
Maybe klintoon was on the tarmac getting a haircut?
I haven't had a chance yet to write to United and O'Hare, but trust me, I WILL. By the time we reached our destination, Scranton PA, my legs were completely numb (a very dangerous condition) and I was totally dehydrated.
I had an almost identical experience at O'Hare two months ago. Some of the details were different, but the bottom line is that United, American and Delta all need to go under. And the entire air traffic control, airport workers, etc. need to be replaced. I'm certain the government security regulations, which keep NO ONE any safer, all played into this as well. We had the same "weather" excuses. That way, they can hold you hostage. Expect the frequency of these instances to increas, not to decrease.
Heh! Good one! I hadn't thought of that. I've been doing searches to see if there WAS some freak storm that afternoon, or some other event, but have found nothing. I'm hoping someone here may have heard something.
Uh, they didn't serve beverages? Wow.
http://www.saintsandheroes.com/thankyou/
Stay safe !
I know O'hare lost electric power in the passenger terminal one day last week. The outage reportedly affected terminals 2 & 3 the most, and United, which is in terminal 1, was relatively unaffected. Of course that's all relative. Especially if you're the one stuck on the tarmac
Ping! :-)
Didn't you know that United AirLines stands for U Aint Leaving.
My pet hate was "Useless Air", but one can always find someone with a bad experience on any of them. Especially now, with "Security", though how "Security" relates to infant-sized seat spacing is one I have not figured out.
As a frequent flyer, it usually is caused by one of two things:
1) They needed the gate for incoming flights, so they moved you out to the tarmac.
2) Once a plane leaves the gate, it has "left" on time. Pads their statistics regarding on time flights.
The flight crew may have been as lost as you were but they are normally a little more patient with the paying customers.
I actually believe that flying through O'Hara in the summer (afternoons) is more problematic than in the winter.
Thanks. I feel a little better now. I'm wondering what the "laws" are regarding just HOW LONG they are allowed to hold passengers on an aircraft hostage as they did. I know that they probably didn't want us to return to the terminal because they knew that a number of us would have turned in our tickets and sought another carrier.
I remember the outage; it was on Tuesday or Wednesday, IIRC. This happened on Friday.
Two years ago we were trying to get out of Minneapolis, where it was perfectly beautiful...problem is virtually all the westbound flights originate on the eastern seaboard where they happened to be experiencing a Noreaster.
Since there we no planes to board, with them all being stuck on the east coast, at least we didn't have to sit in an aluminum tube for 4 hours.
Aliens. Sometimes on their way to Area 51, they get diverted to O'Hare's airspace...something about "subspace restrictions", I don't know.
Complain to the FAA. Last time United pulled one of their phony 'weather' stories on me I did that, and got an apologetic letter and a $50 coupon in the mail. It didn't make up for being stranded at O Hare, but it was better than nothing.
I wonder if this was during the bad storms on the East Coast. If so, then they probably had long back-ups becuase the planes delayed around the airports still had to land first.
These airports have departures and arrivals every few minutes so that if an airport can't land planes for an hour it creates huge backups across the country.
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