The positioning flight to Philadelphia is out of Syracuse, not my favorite airport, but it’s close to where I live and has a lot of options to the rest of the country. The entire check in process was friendly but confusing, at least for the check in agent. She first asked why the machine couldn’t “process” me, to which I replied because my itinerary was too complex for the computer. She then took a closer look at my itinerary, and after a long silent pause, exclaimed, “Jesus! Who put you up for such an ordeal?” We had a good laugh about the US Airways reservation system, which we ultimately both agreed upon was not especially user-friendly. Then came the bad news, because my itinerary had a lot of connections, she would not be able to tag it all the way to Hong Kong, unless she manually wrote one out. This was quite funny actually, here we are in 2014, and baggage tags could conceivably be hand-written. I was not about to take such a chance, and she recommended I collect my bags in Zurich and re-check it then, and I took her advice.
With that problem out of the way, my bags were given the priority tag, and my boarding passes issued for the next 3 flights, and a smile to wish me a pleasant but long flight.



There were no lines at security, and therefore it was not necessary for me to use the priority lane to expedite the process. It’s really sad to see that the only “real” concession store is the Dunkin Donuts; hopefully they can introduce some more other retailers.



The flight itself was rather uneventful, and because of the early departure from Syracuse, we arrived in Philadelphia 15 minutes earlier than scheduled. Great! More lounge time for me, which is always much appreciated.