Over the last four months I have to fly to Chicago for business trips. For some reason, every trip has ended up being screwed up. I’m beginning to think I’m cursed or something. What do you think of this:

Two days before Christmas week (on a Thursday), I needed to fly in to Chicago for a short meeting. Fly in early in the morning and fly home late that afternoon. Sounds simple, right? Well the trip didn’t start off so well. I ended up being late to the meeting because my flight from Minneapolis ended up being late. This wasn’t a big deal as I ended up only being an hour late. I knew the weather in Minneapolis was supposed to deteriote in the late afternoon, so at around 1PM, I checked with NWA.com and found that my return flight, which was supposed to leave at 5PM had been cancelled already. No big deal, I thought — as I had lots of time yet before my departure and Chicago has two airports. I called my company’s corporate travel department and explained what had happened, and they began the process of trying to rebook me on something else. After several minutes, I was stunned to hear her say that the next available flight was at 4PM in the afternoon, two days later!! Needless to say, that wasn’t going to work for me, and one of my coworkers volunteered to rent a car and drive home with me. Seven long hours later I was home.

A couple of weeks ago, I needed to return to Chicago again for a meeting. This time, the plan was for a two day trip. I’d fly to Chicago early in the morning on Thursday, with the meeting starting at 1:30 PM. My flight was supposed to leave at 10:00AM. It started when I got the gate for my flight — it was delayed because the inbound aircraft was late coming in. It was only an hour late, however, so I would still make it in plenty of time. The plane arrived, we quickly boarded and everything seemed good. We pushed out from the gate and the engines spooled up, and then a minute later spooled back down. Apparently, when the pilot cranked up the engines, they got a warning light indicating a plugged fuel filter on one of the engines. They pulled us back into the gate and we waited for a mechanic to come and fix it. Fourty minutes later, they determined it couldn’t be fixed at the gate, and since there wasn’t another aircraft available, they cancelled the flight. By the time they got us all re-booked, I ended up not getting to Chicago until almost 6PM.

This last trip was more of the same. I was supposed to be in Chicago by 9:30 AM on a Wednesday. I had a 7AM departure and moments after I got to the gate, they announced that the flight would be delayed because Chicago-Midway was fogged in. Thirty minutes later, they cancelled that flight. I ended up finally getting to Chicago around 2 PM instead of 9AM.

The final straw was two days later, for my return trip. I was supposed to leave Chicago for home at 5:30PM. The weather forcasters for Minneapolis was predicting a major winter storm that would hit in the late afternoon. After talking it over with my boss, we decided it would be best if I re-booked my flight for the noon flight (at a cost of $120) and then get out of Chicago before the weather made it impossible for me to get home. I cut out of my training early (which was a bummer because it was a great class) and made a beeline for the airport. Everything was going smoothly, until I got the gate. Then the comedy of errors began.

To start, the inbound aircraft was late, so we ended up not being able to depart on time. Once the plane got there, the captain for our flight discovered that one of the gyros (a crucial component of the navigation system for the plane) had failed and we couldn’t depart until that got fixed. Unfortunately, Northwest didn’t have a mechnanic at Midway Airport who could fix it, so they needed to send one over from Chicago-Ohare airport, which is about 30 miles by road. They told us it was take about 45 minutes to an hour for the mechanic to arrive. After an hour of sitting around waiting, they announced that the mechanic was now on his way, and that it would take — wait for it — another 45 minutes to an hour before he arrived. After another hour of waiting, the mechanic arrived and he began his work. He worked on the airplane for over an hour when they finally annouced that the original problem was fixed. Unfortunately, they also announced that there was another problem that wasn’t fixed. The low-level wind shear alert system wasn’t working, and they couldn’t fly this airplane into Minneapolis, which was very windy as the storm approached. They were going to try and find a different airplane, but they might still have to cancel the flight. Now I was getting frustrated. We waited. After another half hour they told us they thought they had everything fixed, and we should board the airplane. We all got on, and even this was screwed up. With all the shuffling around of people, a bunch of us now had boarding passes for the same seats. After getting back off of the airplane, they straightened that out and we got settled in again….and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally the captain came on the intercom and told us that there was some problem with the paperwork for the repair and they were working on getting that straightened out — and it needed to be straightened out in the next 10 minutes or the crew would be over their 14 hour work day limit that is imposed on them by the FAA. I just shook my head. Thankfully, they got it taken care of before the 14 hour rule hit, and we were FINALLY on our way home.

So — the company I work for paid $120 to get me home early, and I ended up getting home later than if I had just stayed with my original flight. Nice, huh?

The only good that has come out of this is a letter from NWA that arrived today. It contained an apology for the last flight and all the delays. In addition, they are giving me 2500 additional bonus miles for my WorldPerks account. That *almost* makes up for the hassle.

I’ve got another trip on NWA coming up in a couple of weeks, but this time to California. We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully I’ll break my streak of screwed up air travel.

–Pete