Technology assisted travel
Waiting in front of a yet-to-open airline ticket counter at 3:40 am on Sunday provided time to reflect on changes in what passes for "normal" eight years after the attacks and three years after Katrina.
I was attending the National Association of EMS Educator's annual conference in Saint Louis. The conference ends at 3 pm Sunday. I had the last non-stop flight from St. Louis to Reagan National Airport. With a change of clothes, I was leaving DC to fly to Chicago Monday afternoon.
TRADE SHOW INCIDENT COMMAND POSTS
The 2005 EMS Expo was in New Orleans, wrapping up on the same weekend that Hurricane Katrina landed. There was little information provided to the attendees about the storm. On Friday a small note was posted at the front desk of the hotel I was staying at. I changed flights and was enroute to the airport Saturday morning when the Mayor announced a mandatory evacuation. Hundreds of attendees and vendors were unable to get out before the levees broke.
Ever since, fire and ems conferences provide a command post with one of the cable networks news/weather channels running all the time. Last Saturday morning we were gathering around to see the first pictures of Ike's Texas landfall and the arc of the deteriorating storm. It was headed for St. Louis. It looked like it would hit us by 2 pm Sunday.
INCREASED SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
I went from an occasional to a frequent flyer in the late 1990's. I knew a lot about frequent flyer miles and little about the infrastructure that got me from point A to B. On Saturday morning I was getting alerts from JoeSentMe about additional weather related problems in Chicago. Joe is a New York City based business travel writer who started this website while stranded in San Francisco on 9/11.
The American Airline hubs in Dallas/Fort Worth and Chicago were affected, starting a cascade of flight cancellations that I could track at FlightStats. Stormpulse showed the current and projected path of Ike. Neither site existed five years ago.
TIME IS MONEY
Losing a flight due to weather could mean you waited for days to get rebooked on another flight. Much higher passenger loads and fewer flights mean that there are few empty seats that can absorb a cancelled flight. It would take a week to get the planes and the crews back into position.
I could not afford to miss my Chicago trip. I bought a one way ticket from USAir that left St. Louis at 6 am and flew to Charlotte, North Carolina. Another flight would get me to DC by 11 am.
PLEASE ARRIVE TWO HOURS BEFORE YOUR SCHEDULED DEPARTURE
I have learned that 24 hour service in the travel industry means threadbare coverage on the graveyard shift, with the accompanying delays in service. Which explains why I am leaving a perfectly nice hotel bed at 3 am.
St. Louis was one of the first terminals I used after 9/11. I remember standing for hours waiting to get to the ticket counter so I could stand for another couple of hours getting processed through security. No airport was designed for the new procedures or the impact of hundreds of anxious and sweaty people in gridlock. So hot, humid and stinky!
This time it took seconds to swipe my card at a computer kiosk that generated a luggage ticket and boarding pass. The USAir flight left St. Louis as Ike was delivering a torrential downpour. I felt smug as the sun rose and you could see that we were escaping the storm.
By time I arrived at DC, St. Louis was sunny and breezy. I was missing one of the presentations I wanted to attend. Using Flightstat, I determined that my original Sunday night flight was never cancelled or delayed … evaporating my smugness.
Mike "FossilMedic" Ward
September 17, 2008, updated (replacement images) November 13, 2011
Also on FireGeezer…
- Winter Carnival Travel Tips – November 13, 2011
- Thousands of United passengers have disrupted flights this weekend due to a computer mis-migration – March 4, 2012
- Grimsvotn eruption previews Rapture? – May 21, 2011
- The Comfort of Consistent Mediocracy – October 23, 2011
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