Interview with Cranky Concierge Owner – Job Shadow
I was contacted by this site so they could learn more about what it means to be an air travel assistant. It was a lengthy interview and they published it verbatim.

Airline to offer baby-free ‘quiet zone’ – NBCNews.com
In a story about child-free sections on airplanes, I was able to chime in with some personal experience.

In the Trenches: A Successful Vacation – Intuit Small Business Blog
My long-awaited vacation came and went and the business continued on successfully. I was thrilled.

The day is finally here. Tomorrow, is the 2nd annual Cranky Dorkfest (#dorkfest for you Twitter-folk) at the In ‘n Out on Sepulveda just north of LAX. I’ll be there from 11a to 2p, so please come on by to say hello. Here are some answers to a couple of questions that have come up.

How do I get there if I’m already in LA?
If you’re in LA and are coming from the south, take the 405 up to the 105 west. (For those who are coming from the east, just take the 105 west.) Exit Sepulveda North and turn right. You’ll see it on the left. Just look for all the drooling people staring skyward.

If you’re in LA and coming from the north, stay home. Yes, it’s the ill-timed Carmageddon this weekend, and that means traffic is likely going to be bad to the north. If you really want to come from the Valley, you can always come through downtown LA and then head over on the 105. Those on the west side can shoot for surface streets, but it might be ugly.

What if I’m flying in?
If you’re flying in, you are awesome. Thank you. To get there, you have a few options. The easiest is usually to try to take the Parking Spot shuttle to the Sepulveda lot. (Do not take the shuttle that goes to the Century lot or you’ll be in the wrong place.) Leave a nice tip since you’re not actually going to the Parking Spot, but In ‘n Out is right next door. Some have reported that they are cracking down on people going to In ‘n Out. If they won’t let you on, you have options.

You can just walk it. From Terminals 1, 2, 3 or Bradley, turn left out of baggage claim and walk until you hit Sepulveda. Cross the street and turn left. After you pass the runways, you’ll see In ‘n Out back across the street on your left. If you’re coming from the other terminals, it’s a tougher walk. You might want to just take the shuttle to Parking Lot C/LAX Transit Center and then you can walk up Sepulveda from there.

What is the schedule of events?
It’s pretty simple. I’ll be there from 11a to 2p myself. I’ll grab a burger and be outside, ready to hang out and watch airplanes with everyone who shows up. I’m leaving the family at home, but feel free to bring your family, bring your dogs, bring people who have no interest in airplanes…. Just come and hang out and enjoy what should be a good weather day tomorrow. The only other thing of note to mention is that Routehappy will be giving away some t-shirts. There won’t be enough for everyone, so we’re going to figure out how to give them away tonight.

What if I don’t like In ‘n Out?
I have to seriously question your sanity. You’re a vegetarian? No excuse. They make a mean grilled cheese. It’s not on the menu, but just order it. Or you can just get a shake. Mmm … shake. But there’s also a park out there so bring your own food if you must. While it’s hard to believe, you can enjoy watching airplanes without a Double Double in your hand. (It’s just note quite as good.)

What should I wear?
Black tie. Ok, maybe not. Just a regular suit and tie will be fine. And by “suit” I mean “t-shirt and shorts.” By “tie” I mean “flip flops.” That’s what I’ll be wearing, at least.

I look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow!

In my Hawai’i trip report earlier this week, I mentioned a terrible experience with the TSA on our return from Maui, and I said I’d write it up later. Here’s what happened.

First I should say that this isn’t me complaining about being felt up or going through body scanners. The real problem here is that the TSA decided to do something just for the sake of pretending it was providing a secure travel environment. It was “security theater” at its worst, because it didn’t even provide a sense of security. It was a ridiculous waste.

My dad dropped us all off at the curb so we could check in and then he would return the rental car. We checked in quickly and went over to security. At the main security checkpoint at Kahului, the lines weren’t long, but a line-minder saw our stroller and said we had to go into the security line further down. This line was for all of the people who were going to take awhile to get through – strollers, wheelchairs, etc. With only one line open in this area, it moved like molasses even though there were so few people in the line.

We had a bottle of factory-sealed formula (at right) for the flight so we could feed our son on the way home. As on the way out, we had to give them the formula and they put it in some magic box to test it. I’m not quite sure what the black box does, but there’s some kind of sensor or something that they put on the bottom of the bottle. This wasn’t an issue on the way out, but coming back in Kahului, they were clearly having problems.

My wife took our son through the metal detector and I got all of our belongings through the x-ray machine. Once on the other side, my wife had put him back in his stroller and we started gathering our stuff. Soon enough, we were completely put back together but we had to wait because they still hadn’t given us the formula back.

The TSA agent who was operating the black box came over to talk to whom I assume was his supervisor about something, and she went over to the box. For whatever reason, they couldn’t get this thing to work. She came over to me since I was the one still waiting for the bottle while my wife stood a bit further down with the baby and the bags, and she told me they couldn’t test the formula this way. Thinking they were going to tell me we couldn’t take it with us, I was about ready to explode. We had to feed our child.

Instead, however, I was told we had two options. The first was to open the bottle so they could test it. I wouldn’t even let her finish her statement because that’s a non-starter. You can’t open a bottle of formula and then close it back up. In general, it has to be consumed within an hour after opening, especially since we couldn’t refrigerate it.

That brought us to option two: a full body and bag search. This made very little sense to me since this was a factory-sealed bottle of formula, and I couldn’t quite figure out what a full body and bag search would turn up. But maybe they figured if I was going to use a bottle of formula to blow up an airplane, I would have other bits and pieces hidden on me. Right.

So they looked at me and my wife and asked whose formula it was. Um, it’s the baby’s. But that wasn’t the answer they wanted, so I just said it was mine. They told me to grab my bags and come with them to the side. Wait, I had to grab all our bags? “No, just the ones that are yours.”

Was this a stupid joke? I could have picked any bag out of our carry-ons and said it was mine and they wouldn’t have had a clue. If I had a bunch of bomb-making material, I could have just left it in one bag and picked up the diaper bag, or my wife’s bag. And let’s not forget that they’re letting my wife just walk away without being checked herself. If I were trying to smuggle something on my body, we could have just said it was her formula and then I would have walked straight through while she got frisked.

I thought about raising hell, mostly because I figured I could then have a couple extra days on Maui… but I didn’t think jail was a good way to spend time in the islands. They groped me and swabbed everything looking for clues of my assumed terrorist plot. Then they roughly emptied my entire bag, searched everything, and shoved it all back in without regard to how it was originally packed. Of course, nothing was found.

As we wrapped up, I received a call from my parents. Where were we? My dad had already been back from the rental car place (you need to take a shuttle back to the airport), they had gone through security, and they were sitting at the gate. Nice.

Again, it’s not the searching and groping that bugged (though of course, it is annoying). It’s the fact that this was in no way keeping anyone safe. If I were trying to blow something up, it would be so absurdly easy to just get around their little song and dance. It seemed like they felt like they had to just do something… anything. Too bad it was completely worthless.

What a giant waste of time, money, and effort.

It’s a rare Wednesday post for me today, but I had two things to mention.

First, please remember that this Saturday is the 2nd annual Cranky Dorkfest at LAX. What is it? Just a bunch of us airline dorks getting together to watch airplanes at the In ‘n Out Burger on Sepulveda just north of LAX. I’ll be there from 11a to 2p and we have some special guests including Henry Harteveldt (@hharteveldt), David Parker Brown (@AirlineReporter), and the NYC Aviation (@NYCAviation) folks. We’ll also be giving away a limited number of t-shirts from the new site Routehappy. I’ve recently become an advisor to the company and CEO Bob Albert will be there on Saturday. If you have suggestions for the site, make sure you flag him down when you arrive.

Second, I wanted to issue a correction to a post I wrote about United’s split operation in San Francisco. In that post, I said “United has been strangely silent about this. There is a page on the SFO website describing what’s happening but United isn’t saying much at all.” Apparently that’s not true.

Boarding passes have a highlighted message:

You probably can’t read it on the image above, but it says the following:

United ticketing, check-in and baggage drop for all flights are located at Terminal 3 at San Francisco (SFO).

You may proceed through security at Terminal 3, and if you are departing from Terminal 1, take the shuttle bus to Terminal 1 from Gate 71A or 87A. If you are departing from Terminal 1 and have already checked in, do not need to see a United representative, and do not have any bags to check, you may proceed through Terminal 1 security with your boarding pass.

United is also putting it on the “Important notices” section of the website, but I can’t imagine that anyone actually goes there before a flight.

This doesn’t change the fact that United still won’t let you check in at Terminal 1 or claim bags there, and it still doesn’t help people to know in advance which terminal their flight will be using, but there is certainly more communication out there during the travel experience than I thought. So, sorry about that error, United.

Just over a month ago, I profiled United’s poor operational performance and how it wasn’t getting better. My, how times have changed. United is once again running a solid operation while American, well, American is in real trouble thanks to what can only be seen as pilot action.

Why don’t we let this chart tell the tale.

Clearly United has seen serious improvement while American has, um, seen the exact opposite. But why did I break these dates out this way? My original post showed performance through August 12, so that’s why I isolated the beginning of August. After that point, things started to improve. The end of the month saw an airline in far better shape than at the beginning.

I broke it at the end of the month just because it’s a natural break. There was no other reason than that. But why September 12? Ah, that one was easy.

On the evening of September 12, word started to leak out that American management had released the terms it planned on imposing on the pilots now that management had received permission to do just that from the court. The airline decided to impose some terms off the original term sheet, certainly worse than what the pilots had already voted down. Needless to say, the pilots were not happy.

Does that make it the fault of the pilots? Not entirely. I’d say both sides blew this one. The pilots were not smart to reject the last proposed contract. They did it out of anger but it was bound to result in something worse than they could have had if they had just come to an agreement. Now I think they’re starting to realize just what a bad idea that was but they’re just getting angrier.

Now, management could have implemented the last terms sheet as proposed and the pilots probably wouldn’t have had the kind of negative reaction they had. In the end, both the pilots and management should have been able to see where this was going to end up. Anyone want to take guesses what happened next?

Starting the very next day, on time performance tanked. That’s right. The 10 days after the terms came out, only half the airline’s flights went on time. (And by the way, American Eagle was over 87 percent so it wasn’t a weather issue or any sort of anomaly like that.) Oh, and the cancellation rate for American went up a lot as well. We’ve all seen this story play out before.

You’ll hear plenty of rhetoric saying there is no pilot action, but that’s just ridiculous. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily illegal pilot action. There are clear differences between what’s happening here and what we saw with US Airways last year. Most notably, the union leadership is actively discouraging any kind of organized pilot action, at least on the surface. But it is defending pilot decisions to not “ignore serious maintenance issues.” But we all know what’s going on here.

My guess is that this will get sorted out in the courts one way or another, but for now, American is running an awful operation. Talk about a complete flip from where we were a month ago. Now all I can say is that it’s best to avoid flying American in the near term. Please note I say American, and that’s specifically what I mean. If you’re flying American Eagle, then you should be just fine. In fact, American Eagle is running a very good operation lately.

Meanwhile, if you’re flying United, you can take a deep breath. It looks like the operation has finally turned a corner. Let’s hope it stays there and doesn’t go backwards.