Delta Air Lines has apologized for the incident and said it is investigating the matter.
Everything about the airline industry is unrelentingly awful and hostile to consumers. These companies perfectly represent the disregard this economy has toward individual people. That they continue in this fashion, year after year, shows how completely the regulatory state has failed.
Maybe they are trying to pivot and get jobs at Microsoft, Apple or John Deere.
I don’t even understand why people fly so often, it’s awful even when everything goes right. Flying used to be cool and fun.
I absolutely HATE flying and avoid it as much as possible. However, if I’m going to a conference on the other side of the country I can’t dedicate 6 days to travel. I’m 33 hours from LA for instance, that would equate to 3 days each way of 11 hours in the car each day. Realistically, it would be more like 8 total days of travel with 4 each way.
This. Also, going by car is significantly more expensive monetarily, when gas and hotel are accounted for.
Don’t forget tolls!
Driving is rarely the better way to go. It’d be even less so if we had a more comprehensive passenger train system.
Probably, driving is also more dangerous, although I can’t be bothered to look up the stats.
Yeah passenger rails that didn’t suck would be the best option here.
Yeah, spending hours in a sealed cylinder full of cigarette smoke and dudes sexually assaulting the staff was very cool and fun.
No, not that far back, I was thinking more like the 90s.
I’m old enough to have smoked on a plane. :|
(Was probably around 1986?)
The air inside an airplane is actually arguably more harmful today than it was in the immediate aftermath of the short-haul smoking ban. Due to smoking on planes they actually had proper air filtration while in the modern day there are no federal regulations on air filtration for planes and what air carriers elect to employ is very minimal.
Throughout a flight carbon oxides, aldehydes, and other harmful particulates are known to build up in the air up to levels known to pose immediate harm to those subjected to it.
We know this is bullshit because the FAA was all over the filtration standards in planes even before covid hit.
So I’m going to say; source it or delete it.
For work: It is literally my job to interact with peers at meetings and conferences. Hard to get there if I have a week of travel for every conference.
For pleasure: Because the destination is worth it. And the hassle isn’t even that bad. Even without a tsa pre-check equivalent, security is mostly fine if you know what you are doing and prepare accordingly. Liquids baggy near the top of your bag. Have a jacket you can shove your phone and watch into. And so forth. Bring a book or some headphones to keep yourself entertained on the flight. Realize that you can slide your feet under your bag to greatly increase your effective legroom. And don’t hesitate to walk to the restroom, even if just to stretch a bit.
And then I get to land somewhere interesting. Whether it is visiting friends a few states over or spending a week or three in a foreign country.
I fly about once a quarter and I still absolutely love even a mediocre experience. I’d say 95% of my flights are without any issues. It’s been YEARS since a bad experience. I feel it’s completely worth it to explore, visit friends, etc.
Flying became awful for the same reason Reddit became awful.
The TSA?
Oh, corporate greed.
Amd more access to the common folk.
Not knocking down the common folk, but as soon as they show up, your cozy coffee place becomes a noisy place.
I’m not even talking that far back, more like 25 years ago.
Work. My job requires lots of in person meetings/work that can’t be replaced via zoom, etc.
It’s the worst part about my job, but travel started sucking WAY before COVID.
Air travel started to suck after 9/11. IMO
Overwhelmingly for me it has been work related. I think excluding a funeral and work I have flown only two round trips the past decade. I am at the airport about 6 or so times a year.
Maybe the United States shouldn’t have removed several regulations from the airline industry and letting them govern themselves
I have flown on airlines based and operating entirely in the 3rd world that were consistently better than Delta domestic in terms of how you were treated.
“Uncomfortable temperatures” is a wild understatement. People could have died
They don’t like to turn on the engines for AC because it wastes fuel.
Engines aren’t used for AC on the ground. The APU is, or an external AC unit is attached to the plane.
“The plane ultimately had to head back to the gate”.
Sounds like they weren’t at the gate anymore, and I doubt they have external AC on the taxiway
I’m surprised they don’t have a way to pump in A/C. Maybe they were too far from the gate.
They very much were
I fully understand the logic in play here. Been on enough flights out of ORD during the winter where pilots just don’t give a fuck. If you go back to the gate, you will be grounded and nobody is leaving. If you stay on the tarmac “waiting” for as long as possible, there are good odds you get to take off. Pilots want to get out of the airport just as much as passengers do.
There need to be stronger safety regulations to prevent this from happening. But it is very easy to imagine a situation where the pilots didn’t realize how bad it was getting in the cabin and figured “We’ll be given the green light to taxi to a runway any second now”
Compression requires a shit load of energy and additional weight. When a plane is flying it can use a ram air for compression.
I’m saying have an A/C cart with an air hose that hooks up to the plane. I’ve seen them used in certain situations.
Someone is getting sued.
I thought it was illegal now for airlines to keep people on the tarmac for hours like this
Maybe the cost to do this is less than the expected value of
How likely to be caught * size of fine
?
I could have sworn there was a law that was passed a while back that limited the amount of time passengers could be stuck in a plane rather than return them to the airport.
Incidents like these expose how dysfunctional and unsustainable our current economic system remains in this catastrophic climate crisis.
And of course I am flying next week to a hot area.
