breddy.net

Last week I had what might be the strangest air travel experience I’ve ever had. I was flying from Raleigh to Ft. Lauderdale via Atlanta. Before the gate agent in Raleigh opened boarding for the flight, she found out that our plane was called in for maintenance. It wasn’t fifteen minutes before she changed our gate to the next one over and told us we’d be on a different plane. No problem, we thought.

Turns out, AirTran had rerouted a nearly-empty Atlanta-bound plane from Richmond to stop and pick us up. Captain Bill on the Atlanta plane was given authority to agree to or reject this plan and apparently he felt that we could make up the time lost and get to Atlanta without much delay. The gate agent informed us we’d have to board the plane quickly and lined us up on the jet way. The plane pulled up and we all boarded, finding seats anywhere we could among the slightly disgruntled Richmond passengers.

At this point we were unsure what to think of all this, but one thing was for sure: AirTran is either the most efficient, cutting edge airline or among the stupidest.

Captain Bill made incredible time to Atlanta and I have never seen such aggressive taxiing. Unfortunately, Atlanta is a busy airport and elation changed to distress as we waited over ten minutes on the tarmac for our gate. I should mention that several of the passengers, from both Raleigh and Richmond, had outbound connections and it was after 9:00pm.

Of course the flight attendants had no information about connecting gates (how is this possible?) so I hurried off the plane to check with the Atlanta CSR about my outbound connection. “Ft. Lauderdale is gone”, he said. Well shit.

Just to be sure, I walked over to the gate listed on my boarding pass, which turned out to be the wrong one. I rushed over to the correct one to find the plane was still there but the jet way had pulled back (about 3 feet). I explained our situation to the gate agent who began making calls to see about holding the flight. By that point, other FLL-bound passengers had showed up and were frantic to make their connection. 9:09pm is the last AirTran flight out before morning!

We all stood there at the gate for a further fifteen minutes while the Ft. Lauderdale flight sat at the gate and we were told that FAA regulations prohibited them from pushing the jet way back out to let us on. Frustrations set in for all of us, especially the Richmond folks who had no reason at all to be late, let alone miss connections. The AirTran CSR took the typical abuse from us and we stood there while our plane departed without us.

So the way things played out, this bold move proved a stupid one. AirTran put us up in the Crowne Plaza, got us on the first flight out and compensated us with a round-trip voucher. Moral of the story: when you don’t have the authority (or the foresight?) to hold a few connections, don’t re-route perfectly good flights!