Just one more delay story to end the week. Check out the mugshot on this flight attendant. Yikes. Too much plastic surgery on her last Brazil trip? No, not so much. She was just drunk.

Yes, 26 year old Sarah Mills apparently has quite a few problems in life. As this article mentions, Ms Mills just landed (pardon the pun) the job as an Atlantic Southeast flight attendant. She was working a flight this past Sunday from Lexington (Kentucky) to Atlanta when things went downhill quickly.

I’m not quite sure what made the captain suspect she was drunk initially. Maybe it was her admission that she began drinking Jack Daniels onboard before departure. Regardless, the captain thought twice about taking off with her, went back to the gate and had her removed.

How did she respond? She apparently screamed “you are dead” to the pilot as she was dragged off the flight. She was then charged with operating a motor vehicle under the influence, terroristic threatening and alcohol intoxication. Nice! Anyone who wants to help her out can drop $350 for her bail. I’m guessing she hasn’t paid it since she said she only had 50 bucks in the bank.

Believe it or not, her blood alcohol turned out to be only .032, far below the legal limit to drive, yet she looked like maybe that .032 was just a .15 delayed a few hours. In the end, they had to cancel the flight due to lack of crew. For once, a canceled flights passengers were probably happy about.

I’ve had enough talking about delays, let’s move on to something else today.

There was a story that came out the other day about a guy who recently smuggled a monkey from Peru to New York, and it brought back a flood of memories.

No, it had nothing to do with my monkey smuggling days. We don’t talk about that anymore. It brought back memories of comfort pets. Now, this monkey was not legally allowed to be on the plane, but there are actually some cases where that is permitted.

When I worked at America West, I was in charge of keeping the contract of carriage updated. Usually, something urgent would come down the pipeline, and another workgroup would call me breathlessly asking me to change it yesterday. I usually just did it, but I always wanted to know what was behind the change first.

One time, I received a call saying that our seeing-eye dog policy had to be changed immediately because it couldn’t be limited to dogs. You can imagine my response:

Me: “Is this a joke?”
Them: “Believe it or not, other types of animals are becoming more common as seeing-eye pets.”
Me: “Like what?”
Them: “Ponies.”
Me: “Ponies?!? Where the hell do you put a pony? Tied to the lav door with a rope?”
Them: “No, these are little ponies that fit in the bulkhead.”
Me: “Uh, ok.”

I really didn’t believe this at the time, but sure enough I had a picture of a pony sitting in the bulkhead of another airline’s airplane in my inbox soon after. There is even a Guide Horse Foundation which helps place ponies with disabled people. As you can tell, these are some pretty small ponies, but wouldn’t you still be freaked out if you pulled up to your bulkhead seat and saw a pony staring you down?

And don’t think it stops with ponies. There are monkeys too. Apparently, people who do not have use of their arms have monkeys that act as substitute arms – feeding them, etc. So again, there you are in the bulkhead about to dig in to your meal when out pops Mr Peepers and he starts feeding his owner. I know, it’s absolutely ridiculous . . . they don’t serve meals anymore. But just pretend that they did, and you can see how this might be a bit uncomfortable for the rest of the row.

So, fine. I have no problem making that change if it’s the law, but there’s more.

Me: “Is that it?”
Them: “Not exactly. We also need to broaden the policy to allow comfort animals onboard.”
Me: “What the hell is a comfort animal?”
Them: “It’s an animal that people need to fly with for psychological purposes. They have a calming purpose.”
Me: “What the f***?!?! Ok, I’ll be sure to tell my friends to declare their St Bernard a comfort pet next time they fly so they don’t have to check him.”
Them: “This is serious. There are doctor’s notes coming along with these animals. And it’s not just dogs. People have ferrets, rabbits, gerbils, etc.”
Me: “Is this a crank call?”

Sure enough, we heard stories about people who claimed all kinds of psychological stress issues, and they had to bring their animal with them to keep them calm. At first, it seemed completely ridiculous, but then I figured that would give me my excuse for bringing Mr Icey, my pet polar bear onboard. As you can see at right, I got a doctor’s note saying I needed my comfort polar bear with me on all future flights.

Of course, there were some problems with this plan (the whole thing, not just the polar bear). Soon after that phone call, it became headline news when someone’s 300 pound comfort pig freaked out on landing (on another airline), ran all over the place, cornered a flight attendant, and relieved itself in the forward galley. SOOooiee!

So, what happened in the end? Well, we did make the change, but I don’t know if it ever got put to use . . . other than Mr Icey of course.

Current events have really helped me stick with the “delay” theme this week. As most people know, Virgin America’s first flights take off today. The plan was to have a flight from JFK and another from LAX land in San Francisco at the same time. That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

A big group of storms hit JFK this morning causing painful delays, as usual. This article notes that Fred Reid, head of the airline for a couple more months, didn’t make it in time for the ceremony due to the bad weather. The plane was christened “Air Colbert” after the inventor of the word “truthiness” and host of The Colbert Report, Steven Colbert, but he was apparently also delayed by traffic.

Far worse than the delay itself (that happens), Virgin America, which has promised to be customer-service oriented, appears to already be falling down on the job when it comes to customer information. When you go to the airline’s website and look for flight information, it shows this:

It’s 1130a now on the east coast, one hour and thirty minutes after scheduled departure time, and the plane still shows as being scheduled on-time. Not good. If you go to FlightAware, you’ll see under JFK airport activity that the flight departed at 1050a. You only have two flights today. Is it that hard to keep people updated on what’s happening?

That’s certainly a black eye for an airline that likes to talk the big talk about customer service. This USA Today article, points out that “Virgin America’s service will be less grand than the lavish international service offered on Virgin Atlantic, Reid said in an interview. Nonetheless, he promises the best customer service in the business.”

If you’re stuck at JFK waiting for your delayed flight (they’re ALL delayed this morning), you can pass the time by reading the rest of that lengthy article. You may notice I was quoted in there as a “former airline marketing executive.” Sweet – I guess they consider manager roles to be executive positions. I’m waiting for my stock options to appear.

Enough about today’s problems. This airline has been in the works for several years. Congrats to everyone who has slaved over the startup phase of the airline. I’m sure it’s going to feel great to see those planes passing the windows at the headquarters building on their way into SFO today. Now the fun begins. Can the airline make it work? I’ll grab some popcorn and watch eagerly to find out. Let me know if you’ve been onboard. I’d like to hear first impressions.

“Why can’t they just let me off the plane? Just find a gate and let us off. How hard is that?”
   -said by 99% of those stuck on a plane on the ground for a long time

For those 99%, I’d recommend reading this excellent post from a Southwest pilot.

He highlights why it can be so difficult to just pull the plane over and let everyone off instead of facing an extended ground delay.

I explain to the passengers that ATC arranges their takeoff priority on those best able to make the soonest departure. If we return to the gate, we will be unable to make an earlier departure should the flow period be shortened and that will mean all the other planes waiting to go to HOU will be in front of us. That will delay us at least a half hour more.

You’ll have to read the entire post for context, but this pilot sets a one hour limit on sitting on the ground, in general. He used the example above as a reason why it can make sense to bend those rules. And sometimes, when he has let passengers off, it made things worse in the end.

I immediately arrange for an unoccupied gate where we deplane passengers and wait. At 50 minutes before our revised flow time, ATC calls and moves our flow time up 30 minutes. Due to a few “missing” passengers we cannot locate in the terminal area, we miss our flow time and are issued another “wheels up time” 30 minutes later. In this case, delay created more delay, and then, an unrealistic shortterm change in flow times made us yet later still.

Yes, it’s true, you should never be stuck on a plane for 8 hours, but you can understand why airline employees can sometimes be reluctant to let people off. When you consider all these variables, combine them with bad weather and an overcrowded airport like JFK, you can see how it wouldn’t be hard for things to snowball.

Yesterday was a beautiful day in LA with just a bit of marine layer rolling in at the beaches. A little low cloud may cause delays up in San Francisco but it rarely does down here. So it was a little surprising to see that there were delays due to thunderstorms.

It must have been the massive monsoonal moisture to our east, because there was certainly nothing going on here. That made me start thinking about how lucky we are here in LA. Yes, LAX is old and crowded, but when’s the last time you heard about someone stuck on a taxiway for several hours? It just doesn’t really happen.

This is actually one of the few areas in which I find myself feeling sorry for New Yorkers. They truly have the worst airport situation I can imagine right now. As most people know, you have three major airports over there. LaGuardia has been jam-packed for as long as I can remember. Newark has been delay-prone for years as Continental has continued to ramp up its hub.

And then there’s JFK. It used to be a sleepy backwater airport that really only had activity in the afternoon when all the European flights departed. That started to change when JetBlue started flying. Since that point, the airport’s traffic numbers have gone straight up.

American started to build up flights along with JetBlue, and most recently, Delta decided it was time to really step up their growth as well. Within the last year, the number of flights scheduled hit that critical point where the airport began to melt down. A quick look at year over year performance will prove my point.

Below are the monthly Ground Delay Programs (GDPs) issued for JFK by month for 2006 and 2007. A GDP is when aircraft on their way to an airport are held at their departure airport because the arrival airport just can’t handle the amount of traffic being thrown at it. If you’d like to read more about this, click here. Usually, a GDP is caused by weather, because bad conditions mean fewer flights may be able to land. But JFK is beyond the point where weather is the sole cause. Beautifully clear days with favorable winds still find themselves with GDPs issued because there are too many planes scheduled.

Looking at this, you can see that in June of this year, 20 out of 30 days had a GDP issued for at least part of the day. Every month saw massive increases over last year to the point where I would now consider Newark over JFK, and that says something.

The most important question now is . . . how is this allowed to happen? Nobody denies there is a problem, but people keep talking about longer term solutions. Yes, the FAA is redesigning the airspace around New York to be more efficient, but that doesn’t help TODAY. There is only one solution guaranteed to work, and that’s cutting flights.

No airline is going cut flights on its own, because it has no guarantee that others will follow. (They won’t.) The only group that has the ability to limit flights across the board is the FAA, and they need to get moving on this. They were able to get American and United to cooperate by reducing flights at O’Hare. Why hasn’t it happened at JFK?

Is it the impending airspace redesign? Fine, wait for a month until that happens and then you’ll know your true capacity. It’s not going to stop airlines from adding flights though, so there still needs to be limits determined by the FAA. Until that happens, New Yorkers and visitors to New York are going to continue to suffer.

Take a look at the short JFK-Boston route, for instance. The 7p flight on Delta is scheduled for 1:53. That’s 30 minutes longer than the 7a flight and an astounding 1:21 longer than last night’s actual flight time. That means they’re expecting to sit on the ground for probably around 1:15 every day on average. To put things in perspective, a flight at 630p from LaGuardia to Boston is blocked in at “only” 1:19, that’s :34 less than JFK. True, some of those problems are due to Delta’s horribly cramped gate situation at JFK, but even JetBlue’s 640p departure from JFK still has a 1:41 block time, and American’s 555p flight is blocked at 1:35 from their spacious, sparkling new terminal. How could you NOT take the train?

This may just be one example, but you can look yourself and see that it’s like this on every flight, especially in the later afternoon. Something needs to change, and the FAA needs to take action now.