Flight Mayhem

I visited a friend in Florida and flew there of course. Unfortunately it took me 15 hours to get there and on the return trip my luggage arrived almost 24 hours after I did. I have never had a really bad experience like this, stranded in the airport. We were boarded on the plane in Atlanta and ready to roll out when they canceled due to bad weather. That was ugly. The thing that got me through the entire trip was the thought that I could have had a 3.5 year old girl suffering through it with me and did not. It was real easy to take everything with a grain of salt with that in the back of my mind. Even after I was number 54 on the stand-by list for a flight with 160 seats I was rather mellow through the ordeal. On the return trip transfer I could not get over the fact the Tampa airport hub put like destinations side-by-side so two flights to Philadelphia were beside one another and two flights to Miami were side-by-side. The flight times and numbers were off by mere digits and in fact when the other flight was delayed it meant the two planes technically had the exact same departure time. Of course this meant massive confusion and it was not surprising my luggage went missing.

This was the first trip I used flight notification for status changes. I think most of the major airlines offer some form of automatic updating for simple information updates. I am not sure this service is as great as it should be and my experience was more annoying that helpful. Here is the stream of updates for my American Airlines flight from Tampa to Miami, originally scheduled to depart at 5:35pm:

1. 4:14 email: flight times pushed back 22 minutes; departure to 5:57 & arrival to 7:02
2. 5:07 email: arrival time moved up 5 minutes to 6:57
3. 5:24 email: flight times pushed back 3 minutes; departure to 6:00 & arrival to 7:00. Arrival gate also updated from D40 to E31.
4. 6:10 email: no changes and repeated same information from prior email.
5. 6:11 email: flight times pushed back 10 minutes; departure to 6:10 & arrival to 7:10
6. 6:21 email: flight times pushed back 9 minutes; departure to 6:19 & arrival to 7:19
7. 6:38 email: arrival time pushed back 7 minutes to 7:26
8. 7:11 email: arrival time pushed back 2 minutes to 7:28 and arrival gate updated from E31 to D48.
9. 7:14 email: arrival time pushed back 7 minutes to 7:35

That's 9 updates to move arrival time back 33 minutes and down 8 gates at the terminal.