Up in the air: Another rotten day of flight

    I violated one of my principles of air flight yesterday:  Never fly to a destination inside 16 hours drive by car.  By the time you drive to your local airport, park your car, take the shuttle bus to the terminal, check-in, make it through security and arrive a comfortable 45 minutes or more before your flight is due to leave, you have gobbled up a few hours.  Then, if your local

airport is one of those regionals as is mine, Bradley Airport in Hartford, you have to change planes at least once to get to most destinations.  Then, at the other end, you have to collect your golf bag, take the shuttle to your rental car and drive to your final destination.
    All things equal, that gobbles up about six hours in the best cases, and that is only if nothing goes wrong with your flight, such as a tire that needs changing, which forced a delay of 30 minutes for the second leg of my flight today to Wilmington, NC.
    To avoid the petty indignities the airlines pile on you, I don't mind driving another few extra hours in the car.  They are worth it.  Yesterday's roster of indignities included a gate agent in Philadelphia who told me to eat my breakfast within 10 minutes and get back to the gate because we would be boarding the plane as soon as it arrived from the hangar.  I dutifully wolfed down my food and made it back to the gate at 9; the plane (of course) arrived at 9:20 and I couldn't help but notice that it began disgorging luggage.  Is USAirways now putting passengers up overnight in their hangars, I thought?  Of course they aren't (that would be too clever and innovative for an airline).  The gate agent had misspoken; the flight had arrived from Wilmington, not the hangar.  A few minutes later I heard the agent complaining to her supervisor that she expected to be paid extra for having been asked to arrive five minutes earlier than her shift to post the flight information at the gate.  Yikes.
    Then, came the tire problem and the gate agent's admonishment to all passengers to be back at the gate in 30 minutes because the captain had told her it would be "at least 30 minutes."  In airline fix-it parlance, that is typically code for an hour at least.  Luckily I didn't wander too far; they started boarding in 20 minutes and pushed away from the gate 30 minutes after that first announcement.  Do these people actually talk to one another?
    A few other observations about flying:  Flight attendants stand in the doorway of the plane to wish you a hearty hello but don't move a muscle to help folks struggling with luggage and holding up other passengers.  Gate agents and flight attendants make announcements in such perfunctory, rapid-fire fashion that it is impossible to understand what they are saying, even if English is their first language.  Planes late to arrive and needing to make a quick turnaround go out dirty, with not even an attempt to prepare them for the next set of passengers.  However, given a choice between dealing with someone else's candy wrappers in the pouch of the seat or leaving an extra hour later, I'll work around the candy wrappers.  It has come to that.
    As we finally pushed away from the gate in Philadelphia yesterday, the captain announced our flight time to Wilmington of just over an hour with an arrival at 11:35 a.m.  We arrived at noon.  For basically a one-hour flight, he was off by about 42%.
    Proximity to an airport is always one of the things I include in my assessment of a golf community.  Most of us have children and grandchildren, and a nearby, full-service airport can help get them to us and us to them efficiently, at least in theory.  I have advised couples to be within 45 minutes of an airport if they fit that profile.  But if airline service continues to deteriorate, I may change my advice to something like this:  Find a community within a 20-hour drive of your children and friends, and encourage them to come to you. 

    Life is too short to spend even a modest part of it suffering the indiginities of air travel.