It's a long, sizzling summer -- in the lines at the airport

It's a long, sizzling summer -- in the lines at the airport
BY LAURA WASHINGTON LauraSWashington@aol.com
Copyright by The Chicago Sun-Times
July 16, 2007

It's as plain as the oversized schnoz on my husband's face. The nation's air travel system has gone kerflooey. Last month, I went online to make plans for a summertime escape to Miami (yes, we like it sizzling).

Even that first step was an exercise in "ouch." The price to fly to Miami in the middle of hurricane season was sky-high.

If you're still in the queue for your summer vacation, get ready. It's only mid-July, but it's already a long, hot summer for air travel.

The morning of my departure, I checked on my 9:04 a.m. flight time with Orbitz online. Within minutes, the flight had changed four times, and then another gate was assigned.

All this while we were still en route to O'Hare.We arrived at an airport packed with people who were going nowhere.

The departure times kept yo-yo-ing. The gate personnel had no information. Filled with trepidation, we found a spot in the crowded gate area and settled in.

Turns out that we were the lucky ones.

I struck up a conversation with my neighbors. They offered their own airline horror stories.

One woman had been at the airport since the day before. The sixtysomething traveler had arrived from Providence, two hours behind schedule. She was on her way to a connecting flight for Boise. Of course, she missed it.

So she spent the night at O'Hare. She was still waiting on standby and doubted she was going to get to Boise before nightfall.

That was a good bet, I thought, as I looked up to spy a gaggle of passengers dressed in firefighting gear -- also trying to get on a flight to Boise. Think western wildfires.

To my right sat a family headed by a matriarch in a wheelchair. They had dutifully arrived at the airport two hours early. When our flight was called, they had just heard that their gate had been changed.

I guess you can call that progress.

The summer travel debacle got a head start with a Valentine's Day massacre, when massive screw-ups by Jet Blue ensured that hundreds of travelers wouldn't make it home in time to see their loved ones, bosses, clients or anyone else. Passengers were stranded on the tarmac at JFK Airport for as many as 11 hours.

Since then, the airlines have treated us to hundreds of canceled flights, missed connections, diverted flights, and my favorite, overflowing toilets.

Experts say it's a confluence of many things, all of them bad:

Summer 2007 is a record year for travel -- 209 million people are expected to be flying the furious skies. The airlines' profit margins are being squeezed by skyrocketing oil prices. So they are deploying smaller planes, cutting ground and air crews and packing us in. The air traffic control system is overburdened.

The dirty little secret is that while we are all moaning about inconvenient snafus, the jumbo jet in the room is airline safety.

As our flight finally touched down in Miami, I looked out the window to witness a conflagration. An air control tower at Miami International was in flames.

The tower, which was under construction, caught fire after hot roofing tar spilled and ignited. Travelers in the airport were taking shots of the towering inferno on their cell phones.

Precious little of the media coverage and discussion of our travel travails is focusing on our vulnerability to equipment malfunctions and terrorist attacks. Six years from 9/11, we have become complacent. We are back to our holiday ways.

Until the fire next time.