Bottom Of The Barrel

Flying ain’t what it used to be

Over the past few years, airlines are removing more and more in-flight stuff. Travelers have lost the meal on a domestic flight and while that’s ok for the majority of flights, I find it hard to swallow on a coast-to-coast flight such as a 9:20 am EST to 12:45 pm PST without lunch. Almost 6 and half hours without a meal is a long way to go. They also used to give you pretzels or nuts to go with your complementary beverage which might help tide you over on a long flight but those have also gone the way of the dodo bird. Now you have to purchase everything you want to eat, until then run out of course.

On the return flight from San Francisco to Boston [which stopped over in Chicago] we had one more thing taken away – the in-flight movie. Just after take off the captain came on the speaker and apologized that the movie wasn’t loaded into the entertainment system and therefore not going to be shown however we could watch the eye-on-america stuff that they usually show around the movie. A few minutes later, he returned and apologized again and said that none of the video entertainment was loaded but we could listen to some music – if you brought headphones that is and if not you could, wait for it, purchase some for use on-board.

We finally arrive in Boston after a very long day of driving and flying and when we pulled up to the gate, the captain returns to the speaker [different flight/captain than above] to apologize for the delay. Apparently they were having trouble moving the gangway to the plane and it would just be a few minutes longer while they got it straightened out. The ironic part was they knew it was a problem before we pulled up and figured it was easier to make all of us wait instead of them doing a bit of work to get us to a working gate. Flying ain’t what it used to be.

posted by TheWino @ 1:55 PM