re: Worst Airport experiences

I appreciate your service. Some people just have no respect for others.

San Diego, both times I've flown out of there. First time I got into a brief argument with a guy while in the security line. He decides to wait until he gets to the bins until he begins removing all his items. Normally not a big deal but he needed five bins and I was in a hurry. After a minute of arguing I quickly calmed down realizing that wasn't the best place to argue. Second time, my connecting flight arrived late and the way their airport was laid out I had to go to the entrance and go through security again to get to my gate. Needless to say, the passengers on the next plane didn't look to happy, but at least the pilot and flight attendants were nice.

Dallas. Worst tsa on the planet

In the summer of '99, I had been in Raleigh to visit my gf and was riding Aitran back from RDU to MEM with the obligatory stop in ATL (their hub). Airtran had just been acquired by the ill-fated ValuJet in a reverse merger, and was having serious teething issues and flying ValuJet's old diesel 9's.

I left RDU in the early evening and landed at ATL without incident. I deboarded and walked into the crowded Concourse C to find out my flight to Memphis was delayed at least an hour. I didn't think too much about it, since the weather wasn't an issue, and I could go to a bar for drink. Meanwhile, I was waiting in line for a pay phone to call my gf. The conversation didn't end well and I needed a drink. I walked down the way to find out all of the restaurants were empty, despite the crowds in the building that numbered at least a couple thousand. So I went to sit.

An hour passed, and the new departure time came and went, no Memphis plane. It's now probably 10:30 local. At this point I started to notice something. There were several planes sitting at gates but no one was leaving, only a few arrivals. All the lines in front of Airtran desks were backing up. People were getting irate. Then, an airplane pulled into my departure gate. After a while, we finally boarded. It was late, almost midnight. I found my seat and waited. The plane was filled to the brim and getting hot. We sat for about 20mins before the gate agent announced our flight had now been cancelled. No explanation given. Took forever to get back off the plane. Things were becoming quite miserable.

Once back inside, people started going nuts, cursing and kicking stuff. The pay phones had lines a mile long, confrontations started. Then there were the smoke rooms. People were lined three deep and smoke was billowing out into the concourse. The fire alarms went off. It was turning into chaos. The fire department moved everybody to the other end, and prohibited any more smokers from entering the rooms. I finally got to a counter. The entire flight bank had been cancelled, why?..because the flight crews had been flying too many hours on line. Next flight to MEM was now scheduled for 8am.

I was stuck, no hotel vouchers. I called a friend in Norcross, his mom had him paged from a bar. I hitched a ride with a nice Mexican family to MARTA Doraville station. My friend was too drunk too drive, so his mom picked me up. We then hung out for a few hours at his parents house before I had to return to the airport.

Once back at Hartsfield, my flight was overbooked by 20+ pax. I made sure I got there early enough to befriend the Airtran employees. I also felt sorry for them. When I got on the plane, it occurred to me that we may crash, and everyone's life struggles would end. I knew it wasn't over, no, I had a mad woman's seat. She bitched me out when I wouldn't surrender it, despite her sob story. They removed her and we actually left the gate.

By the time we landed in Memphis, I had to be at work in two hours. I was 3 hours from home. By the end of the day, I'd been awake for around 35 hours.

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Dallas. Worst tsa on the planet

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Really? I feel just the opposite.

Nothing good ever happens at O'hare or Newark.

I fly into Denver a bunch every year and while I like the actual airport, security always sucks. DIA is the reason I got tsa precheck.

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CuseTiger

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When the weather here in Chicago is bad, all hell breaks loose. The winds are the worst because they will prevent the use of the 5 parallel runways, forcing everything to the north/south diagonals.

But what is just as bad (and what you experienced) is when weather in the area restricts the departure fixes. If there is a storm over one of the main fixes, they have to route the planes over other ones, leading to even more spacing issues. If for example, the Tokyo bound flight needs to cross the airfield after takeoff from Rwy 10L, it basically shuts down any activity on the north half of the airfield until it clears its fix.

As for the far south runway, I was there when they opened 10R, it is only used when landing to the east but the max taxi time from runway end to the farthest UA gates on the north side was modeled at 25 minutes. You have to go around the end of the runways, rather than through them. This is how they keep the runway throughput up. It sucks, but airlines will gladly burn the fuel on a taxi rather than a holding pattern.

ORD ops can be VERY fragile. 22L is the most productive runway on the airfield and can work in east and west flows. The new terminal/airfield work they recently announced will make the airfield work much better, but it is just a very congested airspace.

You have Midway just south, Milwaukee and Chicago executive to the north and all kinds of activity above.

i'm thankful i've never been back.