I ran into travel problems yesterday in Charlotte that I've never experienced before. The fact that it was all predictable (and therefore preventable) left me pretty steamed.

Yesterday I was flying BOS-MEM through CLT. I don't normally pay attention to how much time I have to make a connection when traveling by myself. I'm a guy who gets off one plane and goes directly to the gate of the other plane. Once I check out the scene there, I go look for food/bathrooms/drinks/whatever.

As we were taxiing in Charlotte I looked at my CLT boarding pass to see what gate we were leaving. I was shocked when I saw that the MEM plane was leaving in 20 minutes and the inbound plane hadn't even parked yet.

To make a long story short I ran (not "walked quickly", but actually ran) from B to E26 trying to make my Memphis flight. No dice. (Plane was still there, jetbridge still deployed, but the door was closed and wouldn't reopen.)

Thanks to US Airways I missed out on another evening with my kid

Looking back at my itinerary I noticed that the US Airways system scheduled me for a 36 minute layover in Charlotte! Given US' policy about closing the boarding door 10 minutes before departure, I effectively had 26 minutes to make it from one plane to the other.

At those kinds of margins all it takes is a slight delay on the inbound plane in Boston (which we had) to completely screw up the entire operation.

Why in the heck does US Airways schedule like this? This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. They are setting their passengers up for failure from the beginning. I'm a 31-year old man -- I have to think I made it from B to E as quickly as anyone could have and it still wasn't enough.

Finally, I'm curious to see what, if anything, US does to make me feel better about this incident. I'm on an elite trial with them. If they don't do anything, I can guarantee that I have taken my last US Air flight.

(For those that might suggest that I should have asked a GA on my inbound flight from Boston to call down to E-terminal and ask them to hold the plane: I did that, too.)