I'll be home for Christmas...I hope

The funny thing was, as I was packing to make my annual trip eastward, I had just been thinking about how lucky I'd been with air travel. How people were getting stranded by snowstorms in Detroit and missed the first day of winter quarter, or more recently how people were camping out in the Denver airport just a few days ago, but not me. I had even booked a flight from San Jose to Detroit with just a stop in Phoenix--cheaper than flying direct but I wouldn't have to change planes. MyForecast didn't predict any airport delays in any of the airports, so I went to bed the night before thinking I'd have smooth sailing. After all, Denver might just be asking for snow out there in the mountains, but when is there ever a snowstorm in Phoenix?

Dec 23, 9:30 AM. My first sign something was wrong was that the FAA's delays page showed a 90 minute delay out of Phoenix due to fog. Fog? WTF mate? But no matter, I thought; my flight doesn't leave till noon, so I'm sure this will clear up in time.

10:30 AM. I arrive at SJC the preordained 90 minutes before my flight to find a huge line at the America West counter, which I chalked up to being the day before Christmas Eve. I ran into Andy from Stanford, who it turns out is also on my flight to Phoenix, then connecting to Philly. The line doesn't move.

10:45 AM. After not getting anywhere, an America West agent comes out and asks everyone checking into our flight to come outside and check in with the skycap, because everyone inside is trying to rebook after the earlier flight to Phoenix got canceled.

11:00 AM. After not moving anywhere through the line outside, someone else informs us that our flight to Phoenix was being delayed, and would we please go back inside to see if we can reschedule our connections. There's no information on the flight board, and we have no idea what's going on.

11:30 AM. Again, not having really advanced far in the line, another agent comes out to tell us that our flight probably won't leave until 1:30 so it won't get to Phoenix until 4:45 [an hour and a half late], so anyone with connections before then a) probably won't make it, b) needs to rebook, and c) may well not get a flight out before Christmas because every single airline seat is apparently booked. Then she asked people who can still go to Phoenix to step to the front of the line and check in. Luckily, the plane to Phoenix was proceeding directly to Detroit, so it didn't matter how late it got there. Andy's still screwed, and I bid him a sympathetic 'good luck' and farewell. So I made my way to the front of the line.

11:40 AM. Now she announces that America West for some reason is changing planes and the Phoenix flight is not going to Detroit any more. Now I'm in the same boat as most everyone else in the terminal, who aren't happy. People are whipping out their laptops to check airline sites, and calling loved ones to tell them they're not going to make it. I finally make my way to the counter.

11:50 PM. My agent (who's in a considerably better mood than the last agent, all things considered) tries booking me on other airlines, and even considers shuttling me to Oakland to catch another flight. She even calls Southwest to see if they have open seats. Nearby, a stone-faced agent is telling someone he can't even fly standby on any of their flights because "the system can't handle it".

12:00 PM. The best she can do is let me onto the Phoenix flight, put me up in a hotel in Phoenix, then send me to Vegas the next night, then to Detroit, finally arriving at 6 AM Christmas morning. Sensing that this was my only hope of getting off the West Coast before Christmas, I agreed and thanked her for her help. Since I had more than 3 ounces of liquid as a Christmas gift for someone I checked my bag. She warned me that although my flight was planning to leave at 1:30, they'll "try" to leave earlier, so I should get to the gate as soon as possible. Sure enough, my boarding pass had that great mark of the beast SSSS: "selected for secondary security screening". I call my parents to let them know I won't be home that night after all.

12:20 PM. Making all haste to go directly to security without passing Go (or the food court, natch), I get up to the front of the line. Whereupon the TSA dude pulls me aside and asks me to wait for a screener, in line behind some other unfortunate chap (bless that "random" screening). Fearing that my flight might actually be thinking about taking off I try to plead for a little alacrity but to no avail. (Bam! a GRE word I still remember!)

1 PM. I rush to the gate, finding a long line of passengers, and...that my flight's been delayed till 3. Excellent. But I discover a text message from Dad: he found a flight for me from Phoenix the next morning on Southwest, amazingly enough.

2 PM. Andy shows up at the gate, with a similar new itinerary and hotel voucher. Meanwhile a crowd of increasingly irate would-be passengers begins to form for the next Phoenix flight, originally scheduled for 3:30.

3 PM. No plane. The gate staff has taken down any hint of when our flight might actually depart, signaling they have no clue either.

4 PM. We finally begin boarding our flight, only four hours late. At least she bumped me up to first class, figuring it was the least she could do. The guy next to me didn't pay for a first-class ticket either--he was supposed to fly out of SFO but his flight was oversold, so they shuttled him down to San Jose and told him he'd fly out at noon. If he'd only known...

4:15 PM. We leave the gate--with about 40 empty seats. Finally about to get underway, the captain explains, "I don't know what they told you," (always a great way to start..), but that our plane was headed to Phoenix that morning but diverted to Vegas because of the fog, then had to go to Phoenix to drop off the passengers when the fog lifted and that's why they were so late. Right.

7:15 PM. As we're taxiing to the gate, the pilot announces that this plane is continuing on to (surprise!) Detroit. That would've been nice to know too. I consider rushing to baggage claim and fighting my way back on the plane but decide that my parents probably wouldn't be too thrilled about picking me up in Detroit at 3 AM.

At least they put Andy, me, and a whole boatload of other America West refugees up in a nice hotel with free computers for Internet access and boarding pass printing, free breakfast, and free hourly shuttles to the airport. And a decent sushi restaurant across the street.

So I did make it back on Christmas Eve, about 2 PM--only 18 hours later than scheduled. And I was one of the lucky ones. Plenty of people either gave up in San Jose or were still waiting for flights in Phoenix, to say nothing of the poor saps still marooned in Denver. So here's what I learned:

• Don't trust America West or their parent USAir. Granted, this thing wasn't entirely their fault. But they still should've been more upfront on what was happening and been able to do faster rebooking. Once I found myself arriving early for a connection in Chicago and wandered over to a United counter--in the terminal, no less--and within five minutes was holding a rebooked ticket for a flight that left an hour earlier. America West has roughly six people serving all of San Jose, and rebooking with them is a painful process that can't be done over the phone and involves handwritten paper coupons and chanting mysterious voodoo hexes.
• Don't check your luggage and ask to fly standby. A whole bunch of people could've made it to Phoenix and even beyond, because the delays caused a ripple of no-shows throughout the country. Just because a flight looks full right now doesn't mean it will be three hours from now.
• Have someone try Southwest. Their flights don't show up in most ticket agents' systems cause they're just rebels that play by their own rules.