I used to fly a considerable amount
of commercial. I plan to never fly commercial again. Doesn't matter where
the problem(s) lies, commercial airline travel sucks big time.

Me too - same sentiment. The airlines refuse to adopt SOPs to handle the
weather and FAA issues, imho.

I went full bore to earn my ticket after it took more than 24 hours to fly
from VA to MI and another 24 hours back (Tstorms in Chicago both ways). It's
a 4 hour flight in a 172 and/or a 12 hour car ride. The date of that
infamous trip was Labor Day weekend, 2001.

Back in January I flew MCO to LAX. On the return, there was some localized
1mi vis fog in PHX (of all places). It took over 36 hours to fly LAX PHX
MCO. The airline (whose airplanes are white with red and green markings)
has 60+ gates, but once we got to PHX we burnt jet fuel for 90 minutes in
the penalty box. (There's no OP (AFAIK) to get the idle planes off one or
two gates and deplane the inbounds....) And, yes, in a 172 I could have made
the return trip, avoiding the fog, in a little less time - having control
over the plan. Granted, MCO LAX would have taken longer, but I had already
invested 8 or so hours flying JYO MLB to leave the kids with the
grandparents. (It takes 6 hours plus checkin and baggage recovery time on DL
on a good day through ATL).

Dana Carvey's "Bush" could say it best about commercial air travel- "Not
gonna do it...wouldn't be prudent."

IIRC, the airlines that don't operate hubs are the ones making money. Alas,
most of them don't go where I need/want to go.

--

Bob
PP-ASEL-IA, AGI/IGI