I don't see how they stay in business except for the fact that most outlying cities are held captive by ASA (America's (crapiest) Airline).

Those having to them out of ATL are held hostage by a group of employees who could care less about your luggage, travel or end destination. 2 weeks ago, it took 3+ hrs for luggage to appear in ATL. Add that to the 45min-1 hr waiting on the taxiways for a plane to leave our gate. :mad:

I would have to say YES after encountering a 3-hour delay and totally clueless GA's yesterday.

GA insisted on telling us the flight would be delayed by 10 mins when it had not even arrived at the gate 10 mins before shceduled departure. The stories kept on changing before weather was finally blamed. When we finally boarded (after changing gates, FA's advised our original ac did not arrive due to mechanical). What a fiasco. I can understand delays but do not enjoy being lied to.

I had a friend who was flying ASA ATL-ALB - the departue time kept on getting pushed back, originally being shown on time - but arrival time was consisent at 2am (a few hours late), which I thought was quite interesting.
Good old ASA.
-A

And this is news? :confused:

I've had that very same experience, repeatedly, with both Delta mainline and Comair. For DL mainline, the worst station for doing that was LAX. For Comair, I've seen that, a lot, with the GAs at a lot of airports. Including CVG.

One time when the GA told me that there would be a 10 minute delay (5 minutes before departure and no inbound in sight), I looked at her and said 'I'd love to see how we're going to make a 10-minute late departure when the inbound arrival is posted for 30 minutes after our scheduled departure'. She didn't like that one bit, but I didn't like being lied to. We ended up departing 2 hours late.....

AMEN. WITHOUT A DOUBT THE WORST AIRLINE IN THE USA.

I think my ASA summer experience has permanently scarred me. :) I now refuse to fly any of Delta's commuter partners -- unless there's really no choice, it's mainline or nothing.

The problem is Delta keeps changing their schedules, and often they rebook me on the commuters. I demand they find me mainline flights -- and they will. I even took a long all mainline routing through ATL (why are the N-S connections all 2 hours now?) over an "efficient" Comair connection at CVG, at the cost of about 50 minutes.

I figure I'll probably get there faster anyway. :)

Ahh, I know what you mean. A year ago I was flying DL DCA-CVG-ATL-ILM to get to Topsail Island. First two legs were on mainline and were decent enough. When I get off the plane in ATL, I look over at the Departures monitor and see that my ILM flight has been delayed from 202P to 330P. No huge problem. I grab lunch at Chic-fil-A, and head over to the ASA Concourse C (the 7th circle of he**) to wait. 330P comes, with no update (and they switch gates without telling us). Finally, at 350P our CRJ arrives, and boiarding commences another 20 minutes later. Then we sit on the ground in ATL for another 25 minutes before finally taking off. To make all this worse, the A/C on our Tundra Jet is broken in 95 degree weather. The flight itself is fairly uneventful, until landing, when the crew comes in for landing like the Apollo space capsule-straight down and really fast. I'm scared that I'm going to end up as a piece of splat on the runway. Finally, at what seems like the last moment, the crew pulls up and we make another approach, and land very ,very hard. After I deplane, I feel the urge to kiss the ground and yell "LAND!!!". After that experience, I've decided that US Airways is definitely the lesser evil on that route. However, I would not be shocked if at some point DL were to eventually fly a daily MD-88 in there.

I agree with you that the point where everything breaks down is ATL ground operations. Stuff at the outstations seems to be fine, with whatever problems they seem to have are because of Atlanta. The only operation that is comprably as bad is US Airways's Philadelphia disaster, both commuter and mainline. Washington Dulles's UAX opeartion at Concourse G was even worse that ATL C/D and PHL, but that's gone now, thank God.

I flew three segments on ASA this weekend. Even with the bad weather in ATL on Sunday all of my flights left within 15 minutes of their scheduled departure and the FAs were great.

I have to say that I am not fond of the CRJs though. Being tall, there are no good seats, though I found 1BC to be better than row 8. We also got thrown around by the weather on Sunday morning and I almost was airsick for the first time in my life.

You can probably expect that within the next 6-8 months if rumor is true....

I flew ASA ATL/MKE last Friday. We were 3 hours late taking off due to weather in Memphis, the pilot got sick, the new pilot isn't here yet, ATC holds....take your pick, all were used at some point during the wait. Our departure time changed by 20 minute increments with the gate agents barking out instructions for people not to leave the gate area.

My next itinerary hits the trifecta....ASA, Comair, and Shuttle American all on one trip. Oh joy. :rolleyes: