Flies With Thunder
So, when I fly in or out of New York I am delayed. Pretty much always. When I am waiting in Chicago they announce it as delays from Newark or LaGuardia. When I am waiting in NY they announce it as delays from the tower. I personally blame New York. In any case, I normally fly ATA since I like to be on vacation. They like to shut the doors as soon as everyone is on the plane. There have been a few times that this has been really cool and I have arrived up to half an hour early. Most of the time this means we sit on the tarmac for a while though. This last time I took Continental instead because they were cheaper.
The bad thing about Continental is that their seats are closer together than ATA’s. (The Seat Pitch is claimed to be the same, but my Dimension A happens to be 28″ which is 2″ longer than the minimum required by the airlines. I fit on ATA, but not on continental. ATA must have thinner seats. I also think continental’s seats pivot lower allowing the jerk in front of you to have more leverage to slam your knees.)
The advantage is that they try to not board the plane until they need to. This means that it looks like the plane leaves later, but you spend less time on the tarmac. That is really nice. This last time they claimed a delay of over an hour, but got us on after only half an hour. Then we waited on the tarmac. I was going to get all pissy about sitting around, but this time they claimed a weather delay. I wasn’t buying it until we took off. Looking out the window was amazing. God was pissed. You could actually watch the thunderheads form. While we were going up to our flight path the captain kept making hard hard banks to go around the cumulonimbi. I no longer felt bad about waiting for our brief window of opportunity on the ground.
I also now take back everything bad I said about The Day After Tomorrow. New York, you had better watch out.