What's With the Feet?

Is it really OK to take off your shoes on an airplane and prop your rotten toes up in the faces of the surrounding passengers? If not, please send a tweet to the dork who sat next to me en route to Washington DC today. And one to the guy who sat next to me on the way to Chicago recently.

I hope my recent experiences in this department can be categorized as a confluence of highly unlikely chance events, and not some emerging trend of barefoot flying. If it is the latter, then I have found the threshold of irritation that might keep me on the ground.

Full-body scan or grope; fine. Snot-nosed brat kicking my seat; I can deal. Cardboard chicken with plastic broccoli; bring it on. Uncle Oscar’s lower extremities; no can do.

Are shoes really that uncomfortable? How about the old trick of trying them on before you buy them? Is that too much to ask…that fellow passengers buy shoes that fit well enough to wear while flying?

These people are probably the same ones grousing in the security line about the great inconvenience of walking barefoot through the scanner. Do they want their shoes on or off?

I know some people like feet (Rex Ryan has made news recently for this) while others find them gross. I am not particularly fond nor particularly put off by feet in general. However, if your feet have twisted, hairy toes and jagged, yellow nails covered in fungus, I would prefer not to encounter them in the close confines of airline seating.

Flying through Lightning

I know it doesn't sound safe but radar technologies allow planes to fly adjacent to electrical storms without really entering the danger zone. In my opinion, doing so affords a viewing opportunity that is difficult to beat in terms of sheer grandeur.

Last night, I sat on the runway in a 767 at O'Hare in a driving rainstorm awaiting a break in the weather so we could take off for Los Angeles. When the tower gave the word, the pilots maxed the thrusters, got us airborne almost instantly, and then banked a hard right turn up through a seam in the storm. As we climbed through a wall of black clouds, the view outside of my window was one that will stay with me.

I was sitting just ahead of the wing so, from my vantage point, the forward-facing spotlight on the wingtip illuminated the rain spectacularly. At 700 MPH or so, it looked like we were flying through a river. When we emerged through the roof of the lower cloud bank, I could see that we had entered a lateral chamber between the lower cloud bank and another one thousands of feet above. Inside this chamber, we appeared to be completely surrounded by jagged bolts of electricity flashing at a rate of about once per second. Each white-hot bolt, one more brilliant than the next, turned the night sky into a purple backdrop hovering over a rumpled terrain of white and yellow clouds and beneath a ceiling of black and blue clouds.

I know how distances are distorted in the sky when there is no object of known size to help you gain perspective so I am sure the closest bolts were not likely within 50 miles of the plane. Nonetheless, it felt like we were in the center of the storm and the visual effect was mesmerizing.

Bravo USAir!

If you fly enough, or maybe even if you fly at all, you will accumulate some stories about being wronged or inconvenienced by an airline. Occasionally however, they surprise you.

I recently booked a USAir flight itinerary from Orlando to Philly to Phoenix to Santa Ana. If perfectly executed, this plan would get home moments before my kids fall asleep which is important to me. Obviously, having multiple connections increases the likelihood of a snag.

Upon arriving at the gate for the first flight (moments ago), I noticed that it has been delayed by 15 minutes but I quickly concluded that this probably will not cause a major problem for me. The gate agents announced that "weather in Philly has delayed some take-offs" and we cannot land there until our arrival gate is evacuated. As I was thinking through the implications of this, the agents called me to the counter.

The good people at USAir had reviewed my itinerary, taken note of the risk that my multiple stop itinerary would be disrupted, and booked me on a completely different route through Houston that will get me home 1 hour earlier than the original plan. No cause for a major celebration, right? After all, if they cannot get me to my destination, it is a problem for them as much as it is for me.

Here's the remarkable part. They re-booked me on a Continental flight thereby transferring the revenue from USAir to their competitor. Based on my many attempts to pull off such a maneuver for my own convenience in the past, I can tell you that airlines are extremely reluctant (and that's probably an understatement) to transfer revenue unless it is an absolute last resort. They would usually prefer to pay for your hotel to stay overnight in some connecting city rather that do this. Today, USAir did it for me voluntarily based on what they thought would be best for me.

This is especially remarkable given that, at this point, it looks like I could still probably get into and out of Philly in time to make all downstream connections. I am sitting at the Continental gate now; we'll see how it all turns out but I am quite pleased with USAir for having anticipated a potential problem and taken costly steps to prevent it from coming to fruition.