Travelers' Woes Grow in 2007

There are two kinds of travelers in the world: Me and B.A. Baracus -- and everybody else. B.A., played by Mr. T, was a character on The A-Team, the 1980’s TV hit show. Tough as nails in every situation, B.A. could drive, shoot or  fix anything and blow through doors by staring them down. But his one flaw, his Achilles heel, was that he didn’t like to fly.

Whenever the team needed B.A. to go overseas, Hannibal Smith, the team’s leader, would drug poor old (“I ain’t flying!) B.A. and drag him onto a plane, only to have to endure his wrath when he woke up after the flight.

Sounds like a good plan to me. Like B.A., I hate to fly.

To make things interesting, I have to wear a medicated patch for motion sickness when I am airborne. After all those years of getting sick on rides at amusement parks, I finally found that these patches do help with the motion sickness. (A friend of ours told me once that there is a physical reason that some people get sick from motion and others don’t. I don’t’ know the details but I do know that I have it in spades.)

So with my patch taking care of one anxiety, I am now left with another: claustrophobia. I have always been a little anxious in tight spaces, but like so many things as we Baby Boomers age, it has gotten worse lately. If I sit in the aisle seat on the plane I am OK, at least until they stop the beverage cart right next to me. Then I start coming apart a little. But if I sit in the window seat or the middle seat, I don’t do well at all. It’s almost as if I am experiencing a panic attack. I want to move and can’t. The “flight” response is very strong and not much that can be done about it in the confines of an Airbus.

I try to plan my air travel so that I always have aisle seats, thus making the trips more bearable. But as our recent return from California proved, if God laughs when we make plans, as the saying goes, He must have been hysterical when he saw our itinerary.

With the alarm set to go off in ten minutes, we got a call at 3:50 a.m. on Sunday from our airline telling us that our flight home to Phoenix -- with connections to Pittsburgh -- was cancelled. The best the airline could do was to fly us back to Pittsburgh on Wednesday, and that was via the all night “red eye” flight. These arrangements were pretty much unacceptable for people who had to get back to work and school from spring break.

We decided to made reservations with a different airline to fly home on Monday through Cleveland (where we would have to rent a car to get back to The Burgh). When we boarded our first flight of that day, we were told that there was no row 18 on the plane where our seats were supposed to be. We had to get off the plane and wait while the agent shoehorned us into the back of the plane.

We made it to Salt Lake City in time for our connection east, boarded the plane to Cleveland, but then had to deplane as there was a maintenance problem. The airline posted a 5:15 p.m. departure time for our repaired plane, so many of the 150 passengers -- including us -- waited around for the new departure time, since there were very few reservations to be gotten anyway. Around 3 p.m. the word “cancelled” appeared next to our flight to Cleveland. So we were scrambling again to try and get other reservations.

We had to retrieve our luggage from the cancelled Cleveland flight, go to another airline’s check in counter, check our bags, and go through security again, all to make a flight west to Las Vegas. (That’s another thing B.A. and I would agree on: You never go backwards when you are enroute. Never.) We joined the cattle call for seats on the Vegas leg, and after landing, went swiftly to the gate for our connection to Pittsburgh. We waited in a longer line there, with me sweating out whether I could get an aisle seat, which I did, thank heavens.

In Pittsburgh, we waited for our bags for about a half an hour, the normal waiting time these days, with all the returning Vegas partiers and got home around 2 a.m. Tuesday, still a day ahead of when our original carrier planned to get us back.

Seems to me that the airline industry is like a house of cards. One false move, either weather or computer problems or who knows what, and the whole thing tumbles, stranding people and baggage all over, like pick-up sticks.

This doesn’t bode well for current and future travelers, of which I am sure I will be again someday, sigh. When you have children who are moving around the country and the world like it’s their backyard as many Baby Boomers do, flying to see them has become a necessary evil.

As for me, I think I will rent some old episodes of The A-Team and see what it was that Hannibal Smith used to give B.A. to knock him out when he had to fly. Maybe I can get some for myself.

By Teresa K. Flatley

3/07

www.boomthis.com

www.tflatley.com