Airline Nightmare - My Story

2006-08-04T18:19:00.000-04:00

August 4, 2006 – 10:23 AM

I sit here writing this post on an airplane using my MacBook Pro on the lopsided (more than usual) tray table that is in front of me, after facing my worst experience ever with flight. Last month I booked American Airlines flight 4726 from LaGuardia Airport in New York to the Raleigh Durham Airport in North Carolina. Everything seemed fine at first, but it all started last night after attempting to check-in for my flight.

When going to the AA website to check-in, I learned that my flight was now going from New York, but not to Raleigh. It was scheduled to go to Washington DC, and not even on the Friday that I wanted, but the day after. All of this happened without any notification. No e-mail. No phone call. Nothing. Had I not tried to check-in the night before, I would have shown up at the airport expecting to go on my cancelled flight.

I called the airline and learned for the first time that my flight had been cancelled due to inclement weather (I was supposed to fly on a small American Eagle plane, and they often cancel those if there is going to be rough weather). Luckily (and I use the term loosely), there was a US Airways flight from LGA to RDU and it fit my time restrictions. American booked the flight for me and assured me that everything would work out. I even called US Airways to book my seats and confirm that I had the tickets for the flight.

I wake up the next morning (today) at 5:45 AM to get an early start to the airport to avoid any potential traffic. I arrived at about 7:30 AM (my flight was at 9:05) and went to the ATM-style machine to check-in and print my boarding pass. I put in my credit card and received an error message stating that I would have to talk to a representative. I figured that because the flight was booked last minute and not by myself that a human would just have to complete the transaction. I was wrong. I waited in line and eventually proceeded to speak to a very nice woman, Barbara T. I explained what had happened and she told me that American Airlines had booked the US Airways flight, but never transferred the ticket. Basically, American never paid for the flight. She attempted to call American Airlines to have the ticket transferred over, and was put on hold for a while. At that point, there was a power failure at the airport (the lights and such remained on, but the computer and phone systems went down). She gave me the AA phone number and I tried calling from my cell phone. It rang. And rang. And rang. After five minutes of ringing, it hung up. Barbara suggested that the American Airlines phone system was probably down as well.

After the computer system was back up, she then told me that if I could give her the old American flight ticket number, she might be able to do the transfer herself. Unfortunately, that was the one thing that I forgot to print out. I had every other piece of paper except the one that I needed. I was able to call home and get the number from my e-mail, but unfortunately it was no help to Barbara. The computer told her that she would still have to call American to have the tickets transferred. I then questioned her as to when I would loose the seats. She told me twenty minutes to nine. It was 8:32 at the point, leaving us only 8 minutes to get the tickets. Barbara was luckily able to get through to American by phone with about 4 minutes left. To make a long story shorter, she was able to hold the tickets slightly past that mark, but it was no help. American told her that whoever booked my flight the previous night had done it wrong and I would have to go over to the American terminal and have a person there manually correct the problem. Well, the plane was taking off in less then 20 minutes, which did not make enough time to do that. My only options were to miss the flight or pay over $1,100 for the two tickets that I needed, knowing that I would probably never get reimbursed from American Airlines. I missed the flight.

Barbara told me that I could make a 12:50 flight that would arrive at 2:30 PM. That was going to be really late for me, but it was better then nothing. She put the ticket on reserve for me and suggested that I go over to the American terminal and ask them if they could make room on either of their two earlier flights (which were supposedly full). So I did.

After taking the bus to the American terminal, I told the person checking in the people just so they could wait in line my story. She let me cut the line and took me directly to someone to speak with. I was not able to catch one of the two full American flights, but she did find that I could take a US Airways flight from New York to Washington DC, and then transfer planes and arrive at Raleigh at 1:01 PM. That was a full hour and a half before the direct flight would’ve arrived. I booked that.

I only had an hour to get back to the US Airways terminal, check-in, get my boarding pass, go through security, and board the plane. I could take the bus all the way around the airport, but I might’ve not made it, so I had to walk back. I followed the pedestrian signs and walked where I was supposed to. I had to walk through one of the parking lots and eventually got to a closed in fence, with no exit nearby. I wasn’t going to walk all the way back and find a new route, so I had to hop the fence. After what I had been through, this was nothing.

I arrived at the terminal and was able to get my boarding pass with ease. I got to security and there was no line, lucky me. I was walking through the metal detector and was then told to stand to the side in the marked off area. I was randomly selected for the extra security screening. How could this possibly get worse? I knew that this is just part of the airline routine, and as long as the security officer assured me that I would make my flight, I was fine with the screening. I was padded down and had my luggage searched. It was also swabbed and put in a machine to detect for dangerous substances. I passed the test, which was no surprise to me.

I was able to get to the gate, make it on the plane, and now am finishing my story from the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. My flight to Raleigh should board in a few minutes and hopefully I will get there on time and without any more problems.

Although it all seems to have worked out (although I won’t know until I am actually standing on the ground in Raleigh, this was an extremely stressful experience to go through.

There were a couple of problems that really bugged me about this whole experience:

First, I was never contacted when my original flight was cancelled. American Airlines had all of my contact information, but I wasn’t contacted in any way, shape, or form.

Second, when I was trying to get on the first US Airways flight, the tickets were actually printed and I could see them, but I was not allowed to use them until American paid for the flight. Besides the fact that American should’ve just paid for them when they booked the flight, why couldn’t US Airways let me on the flight and just have worked out the money issue later? Flights run on tight schedules and I ended up missing mine because a problem could not be resolved fast enough.

Third, I find it completely unacceptable that the power went out in the terminals and the computer and phone systems went down. Where was the backup? Could the same thing happen to the control rooms where they monitor the planes? Flying is a serious matter and there should be zero tolerance for any problems.

Thanks for reading my story, and I hope you enjoyed (so someone got some enjoyment from my suffering - schadenfreude). If you are or happen to know anyone who works at American Airlines and would like to contact me, I was originally supposed to be on flight 4726 on August 4, 2006 having seats 2A and 2C. You can use that information to find me (I would love free and/or first class tickets!)

The Digg Effect Statistics

2006-07-26T12:42:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I posted an entry about a "hidden" feature found in the new Digg Stack and Swarm. I then submitted it to Digg, hoping it would reach the frontpage. Well, it did, and I have been tracking some statistics about the story ever since.

Here are some statistics:
The story took 72 minutes to reach the homepage and 19 hours and 27 minutes to get 2000 diggs. In that time, the story got roughly 13,000 pageviews.

OS Statistics:
Windows - 9649 pageviews (75.79% of total)
Mac - 2135 pageviews (16.77% of total)
PPC Mac - 1370 pageviews (10.76% of total, 64.17% of Mac)
Intel Mac - 765 pageviews (6.01% of total, 35.83% of Mac)
Linux - 799 pageviews (6.28% of total)

Browser Statistics:
Firefox - 9315 pageviews (73.16% of total)
Internet Explorer - 1580 pageviews (12.41% of total)
Safari - 1007 pageviews (7.91% of total)
Opera - 468 pageviews (3.68% of total)

Some things that I found interesting:
- 47.17% of Mac users were using Safari
- So many people were using Intel Macs even though they have only been out for about 7 months
- 8344 people were using Firefox 1.5.0.4 (the latest stable version), while 8648 people were using 1.5.0.x. So, 96.48% of Firefox 1.5.0.x users were using the latest version.
- Only 317 people were using Firefox 1.0.x (3.40% of all Firefox users)

Here are some more interesting facts about the actual digging:
It took 72 minutes for the story to reach the homepage, doing so with 55 diggs. Every so often I would record the number of minutes that had elapsed since I submitted the story to Digg and the number of diggs at that moment. I put the data into my Ti-83+ calculator to look at the results. After performing a few of the regressions, I surprisingly found that the data was almost perfectly resembled by a logarithmic function (r = .98847), with the equation being:

y = -2773.6240451677 + 694.1480838656 * ln(x)

In the graph below, the x (horizontal) axis is the number of minutes that had elapsed since the story was submitted, and the y (vertical) axis is the number of diggs that the story had received.

Here is the data that I collected:

Just so you know, I embedded a small 1x1 pixel image in the blog entry so I could track these statistics.

Digg Stack and Swarm Hidden Message

2006-07-25T17:01:00.000-04:00

With the launch of Digg Swarm and Stack today, I decided to decompile the flash files and do a little "digging" (some pun intended). It is a very complicated file, but one thing stood out to me. It's a little reference to our favorite Senator, Mr. Ted Stevens.

Located in the contents of the flash file, you can find this section:

ASSetPropFlags(this, null, 1);
String.fromCharCode(Key.getAscii()).apiURL = "http://testapi.digg.internal/";
this.mode = "spy";
this.requestParams = {count: 10};
this.requestOffset = -10;
this.maxDigsPerRequest = 30;
this.maxStoriesPerRequest = 100;
this.attachRate = 100;
this.testing = false;
this.running = false;
this.wasRunning = false;
this.paused = false;
this.pauseDialogParams = {title: "Paused", body: "We\'ve stopped updating this screen with new information, to help prevent the Internet tubes from being clogged.", button_yes: "Clog on!"};
this.pauseRate = 5 * 60000;
this.skinPath = "skin.swf";
this.configPath = "config.xml";
this.timestampQuantize = 10;
this.updateRate = 10000;

There are three things that I found important. The best one is the message:
We\'ve stopped updating this screen with new information, to help prevent the Internet tubes from being clogged.

You can also see references to both skin.swf and config.xml, which are just files that are located on the server.

P.S. That message can be found in both the flash file for stack and swarm, and those 2 files exist for both aswell.

jeff's blog

Airline Nightmare - My Story

The Digg Effect Statistics

Digg Stack and Swarm Hidden Message