It wasn't my idea, assuredly, to fly to Washington DC on American Trans Air. No miles earned, for starts. But a new client in DC insisted on making our travel arrangements for us, and then insisted on the absolute cheapest alternative. On a cost basis it was difficult to argue: the midweek roundtrip fare was $409, compared with well over $1000 for a "real" airline. So I chose to be graceful about it. Even planned to take some notes to write an amusing, lighthearted trip report about life on ATA for you folks who'd never knowingly step on an airline with no FF program.
Little did I know that my outbound flight would constitute the last... the last... well, the last normal day for a long, long time.
09 September: TZ610 LV SEA 1159P AR MDW 547A B757-300
I got to a very quiet Sea-Tac about an hour before flight time. ATA runs only two flights a day from here to Midway, and so shares check-in counter space with Aeroflot and charters. There are only 3 people in line ahead of me. I get Seat 20D and the usual rote security questions, asked with no eye contact and no interest in my answers.
The flight leaves from Seattle's South Satellite so I take the train over there. The aircraft, N520TZ, is already there at Gate S11, the same gate BA uses for its London departure earlier in the evening. The ATA gate staff wears no uniforms; one has sweats on. Boarding starts at 1135p and is done in groups of ten rows.
We board through the L2 door. The aircraft is in all-coach configuration, with no bulkhead where you'd normally expect one dividing F from Y. It feels odd. The seat-sets don't match the carpet; the seats are covered with rainbow-colored chevrons, while the floor looks like it could be ex-USAir, though that's only a guess. There's a lavatory set planted at about Row 28. Pitch is very tight, but every seat gets a blanket and pillow, which is apparently more than they can manage on some UA redeyes. The load factor is about 50 percent.
We pushback on time, around 0003, and do a fast taxi. I have never seen an airline make such a fetish of keeping the window shades open for takeoff; it's even in the safety video, and the FAs go around ordering sleepy people to get their shades up before we get to the runway.
We're airborne by 0010. There's a drink service and no further activity. Unfortunately a video program plays brightly on overhead monitors for the whole three hours, frustrating sleep.
We do a very long, low, slow approach into Midway and land fifteen minutes early, parking at Gate B12. Only the landside face of MDW has been renovated; most of the airside, including the B and C concourses, are still a dump.
10 SEPTEMBER: TZ133 LV MDW 710A AR DCA 1000A 757-300
MDW is teeming well before six in the morning as I make my way down to Gate C2. Our a/c, N519TZ, is parked and ready. As I sit in the dingy gate area I see one of ATA's new-generation 737s, the ones with winglets, across the concourse. They're pretty.
We start getting preboarding announcements for Flight 133 at 555a, a full 75 minutes before departure. I actually board 45 minutes beforehand, behind an older couple who exclaim as they enter the plane, "Ooh, it's one of the newer ones." They must be regulars. It's set up exactly the same as the first plane.
I have 33D, aft of the lavset. The load factor is again about 50%. We're all onboard by 645a, and nothing happens -- with no word of explanation -- until 725a. Then we trundle out and take off with no announcements from the cockpit. The FAs demonstrate the same fierce commitment to keeping everyone's window shades up, however.
There is a cup of thin warm coffee on board for me, but no food.
Again, nothing much happens until we land DCA at 1005 and head for our gate in the old, southernmost gate cluster, the one used by TW and NW, reaching it at 1015a. I deplane and head for the Metro, not realizing that this made me one of the last people to pass through Washington Reagan National for quite awhile... maybe, if you believe the rumors, ever.
More about a very different homebound trip later.
Jet'Dillo
Sep 19, 01, 10:59 pm
[QUOTE]Originally posted by BearX220:
[B]It wasn't my idea, assuredly, to fly to Washington DC on American Trans Air.
[\B][\QUOTE]
Well, my hat's off to you and the couple others I've seen post on here about them.
I've been scared off for a long time now 'cause I've never seen an ATA plane that wasn't a DC-8 or L-1011.
[QUOTE][B]
Little did I know that my outbound flight would constitute the last... the last... well, the last normal day for a long, long time.
Now this is interesting.I wasn't aware that Boeing made such a beast. Looks like from the photos available on airliners.net that they're mostly aiming at the charter market with this one. Anybody else got the scoop on this one?
How was it BTW? Better or worse than a normal 752?
[QUOTE][B]
There's a lavatory set planted at about Row 28. Pitch is very tight, but every seat gets a blanket and pillow, which is apparently more than they can manage on some UA redeyes. The load factor is about 50 percent.
[\B][\QUOTE]
Zing! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif
Too true, unfortunately....
[QUOTE][B]
dingy gate area I see one of ATA's new-generation 737s, the ones with winglets, across the concourse. They're pretty.
[\B][\QUOTE]
I've seen photos. It's actually pretty nice looking and certainly much better looking than their others, which are just hokey. I still crack up every time I'm at SFO and see that "Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays" L-1011 parked down in the 20s.
Thanks for the TR. It's good to know that ATA is actually buying some new planes. I've friends coming out here to SF in a couple weeks and it's really been bugging me that they're coming out on ATA. Hopefully they'll get one of the newer ones.
So, would you be gracious again travel-wise if you had to?
JD
Applefan
Sep 20, 01, 12:55 pm
According to the Boeing website, ATA has only 2 757-300s (both delivered in August)and 1 737-800 so far. They ordered a total of 20 737-800s and 10 757-300s last year. These will replace their old 727s and L1011s and join the 757-200s that are already in service. I can remember them using DC10s in the early 80s before they replaced them with used L1011s but don't remember any DC-8s. According to the Historical timeline on their website they list operating originally a 720 in 73 and adding another one in 1978. They added 8 707s in 1981 and sold them in 1984 and added 727s. The Tristars came on line in 1985. The website does not mention ever operating the DC-10 but I really remember seeing some in my youth. Maybe they were leased?
BearX220
Sep 20, 01, 5:01 pm
Tuesday morning, September 11, my colleagues and I were preparing for our meetings in a hotel five blocks from the White House when the first TV bulletins arrived from New York.
A small knot of us gathered around the TV in the hotel bar. There was a smoking hole in the north tower of the WTC. Gee, it must have been an explosion... but there's nothing on those upper floors to explode. Gee, a traffic copter or a Piper Cub or something must've hit the tower... but the hole looks awfully big.
Then came the second plane, the United 767, and it careened into the south tower as we watched. And we knew it was a catastrophe. And yet, part of me refused to accept that these were hijacked airliners with innocent passengers. I thought instead: well, 737s are configured as business jets. I guess you could steal one from a corporate airport. Or: some of those mideast heads of state have jetliners as VIP transports; I guess a terrorist could steal one of those.
When Peter Jennings announced that at least two recent hijackings had been reported, call me naive, but I was literally staggered. I had to grip the bar for support.
Someone remarked that if New York was a target, so was Washington. No sooner had the words left his lips than ABC cut to a shot of a plume of smoke rising over the D.C. skyline. Owing to a trick of perspective, it looked as if the Old Executive Office Building, just west of the White House, had been bombed. The bar fell silent. You could step outside, look down the street and practically see the OEOB.
Within minutes we understood that it was actually the Pentagon that had been hit, about three miles across the river. Then came a terrifying, inaccurate spate of news flashes suggesting that the city was under sustained, wholesale terrorist attack: there was a bomb at the State Department. There were fires burning a the US Capitol and on the National Mall. There were more hijacked jetliners bound for Washington.
All false, as it turned out, but for an hour or two there was a cold, lucid, this-is-it sensation in that bar that I will remember for the rest of my life. Strangers wept and embraced. The barmen began pouring stiff drinks around half past ten in the morning. Nobody's cell phone worked. One colleague's wireless BlackBerry email device remained miraculously alive -- our sole link to our terrified coworkers in Seattle -- but that was it. With rumors flying and the communications infrastructure paralyzed, we were -- if only briefly -- living a scene from one of those surreal this-is-how-World-War-III-begins movies.
When we eventually stepped outside later the tang of smoke from the Pentagon hung in the air and fighter jets roared over the city. Army personnel stood watch on street corners. The city had evacuated, for the most part, and the streets were silent.
My colleagues and I had planned to fly back to Seattle Tuesday night. Undoable, of course. I rang ATA, got through immediately, and rebooked the four of us onto Wednesday night's flight. On Wednesday, as we got some work done under difficult, distracted circumstances, I rang ATA again and had us all rebooked onto Thursday night's flight -- with little faith that it would actually leave. Wednesday night at the hotel bar (by now, practically my firm's new East Coast branch office) we fell into conversation with a businessman from Kansas City who said he was thinking of DRIVING home -- about 1000 miles.
My workmates and I looked at each other and said, basically: WE could do that. On a damp cocktail napkin we figured we could make Seattle in about 40 hours.
God bless the Avis Preferred line. I called it then and there from the bar, got through immediately, and was able to score a one-way premium sedan for pickup at BWI Thursday afternoon -- at a rate of $115./day, unlimited miles. (Only later did I realize how lucky that was.)
Thursday morning brought the news that Reagan National would remain closed indefinitely, so I took an eerily empty MARC commuter train from Union Station up to BWI, which was just reopening. It was deserted and silent and very disconcerting.
I got to the Avis Preferred booth three hours before I'd scheduled the pickup, but they brought round a Pontiac Bonneville for me immediately. Bless 'em again. (This more than makes up for Avis billing me for someone else's wreck last winter.) I drove back to downtown DC, all four of us piled in, and we headed west. (We drove past the stricken Pentagon as we left; cranes and equipment everywhere.)
It felt good to be moving instead of stewing in Washington. It sounds silly, but driving and map-reading and gas-mileage-calculating lent a slight sense of control in what was -- is -- basically an uncontrollable, disastrous situation.
We rolled west through Pennsylvania and Ohio, down I-90. We noticed three things. First, every fourth or fifth car on the turnpikes was a newish, generic American sedan with the telltale windshield barcode denoting a rent-a-car. Hundreds of stranded businesspeople were doing as we were. Second, scarcely a mile passed without an American flag fluttering from a factory window, or a hastily painted "God Bless America" bedsheet banner draped from a flyover, or a truck stop's tall electronic sign -- the sort that would normally be advertising the cheeseburger special or the price of diesel fuel -- exhorting: "Pray for New York." Third, every last person we met -- the gas jockeys and the overnight convenience store clerks and cafe waitresses -- treated us with exquisite, gentle kindness. As if we were war refugees. Which in a very slight way I suppose we were.
One of the four of us, our sole woman, wanted to drop off in Chicago, visit an aunt, and stand by for a flight home at the weekend. As we steered for Chicago Midway Airport around midnight, we heard a radio bulletin that as New York City airports had tried to reopen Thursday night, authorities had detained a corps of suspicious men wearing stolen pilots' uniforms and fake IDs and carrying knives. Good Lord, we thought, this isn't over. They're waiting to execute the next wave. (These reports turned out to be garbled and inaccurate, but they scared the heck out of us at the time.) We tried to talk our colleague into sticking with us but she was adamant. We left her at a Holiday Inn on the MDW airport perimeter at one in the morning. What would have been a casual goodbye became terribly emotional. What were we leaving her to? There are no certainties anymore.
The other three of us rolled on into the American night, down I-55 to I-80 and west through Peoria and into Iowa, listening to patriotic music on scratchy local radio stations and enduring demagoguery from both sides of the issue on all-night talk shows: for every bellicose bomb-them-back-to-the-stone-age type (on Art Bell), there was someone advocating against any sort of retaliation and pleading for more understanding of the terrorists and their pain (on NPR). I don't think either position will prove useful or practicable in the days ahead.
We devised a driving system. The guy behind the wheel kept going until his eyes started to droop, then pulled over and got into the back seat to sleep, while the shotgun rider slid over to drive and the previous back seat occupant was promoted to the front seat and assumed the job of keeping the driver awake. This way we only had to stop whenever the fuel tank needed filling, which it did about every five hours.
We hit Omaha in time for the morning commute (this was where I had my fatigue hallucination as I drove, of Batgirl dressed in a shimmering silver ball gown with rays of light emanating from her head -- I swear that's what I saw, Doctor -- and had to be replaced by a fresh driver) and had lunch at an Applebee's in North Platte, Nebraska. Wyoming was spectacular, and dinner was at a good steakhouse in Ogden, Utah called Ruby River. We stayed away from booze, of course, and stuck to salads and fish and other foods that wouldn't anesthetize us.
We turned north at Ogden for Twin Falls, Boise, Pendleton, Yakima and home.
I can report that it is 2915 miles from the Governors House hotel in downtown DC to the Vashon Island ferry dock in West Seattle, and we covered it in about 45 hours, averaging 65 mph the whole way. (Our colleague in Chicago did manage to get on an ATA flight very late Friday night, after nearly ten hours' delay, and arrived in Seattle only a few hours before we did. She reported there were only a handful of pax aboard and you could've heard a pin drop from takeoff to landing.)
The Avis desk at Sea-Tac only charged me for a two-day rental; the tab was $288. Behind me in line was a guy trying to drive home to Albuquerque from Seattle; he'd just been quoted $600. No rhyme or reason to the pricing structure.
I am a flyover guy. This was my first time driving across the country. I wish it had been under happier circumstances. I can't imagine more memorable ones.
I hope we alll hold it together in the difficult days ahead.
ldsant
Sep 21, 01, 3:35 am
BearX:
Glad to hear that you all made it home safe and sound.