Quote:
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SF Road Warrior:
Someone ought to put ACA out of its misery. Lousy customer service, always late!, deliberate misinformation,
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AMEN.
Well, I tried, but even our local Congressman dies his political death before he got UX/ACA out of business here. Well, at least he said he tried...
I happened to be at MBS this AM. 3 new UX faces being trained by 2 old faces. Altogether 3 UA old timers trying to keep that station floating.

The CRJ had a "DO NOT OCCUPY SEAT" on row 1.
A four hundred pound gentleman smooshed me to the EXIT window...
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum50/HTML/010828.html
Luckily for my granddaughters the EXIT window didn't succumb to the pressure and didn't open while airborne.
As for my wife, she is taking this gutwrenching experience two weeks from now to JAX. When she gets to hate a company its eternal hell. For both.

[This message has been edited by Intrepid (edited 06-01-2002).]

The way pilots are paid varies from airline to airline. Basically we are paid for the scheduled time or actual time if it's greater than schedule(unexpected holding, deice, etc). Some airlines don't pay you if you sit in the deice pad for two hours, which is a real drag since we are only paid by the flight hour, not the duty hour. Here's a real life example of that: a 3 day trip with 11.5 hours of duty and 36h and 5 minutes away from base, but only 4hours and 12 minuts of flight time. I get paid only for the 4h12 minutes of flight time, plus 1 dollar an hour for time away from base($36 and some change). I would agree that padding increases costs, but not so much because of pilot or other employee costs, but because of inefficiency. Having to pad the flight times to create a reliable schedule means that the aircraft have a lower average utiliztion rate-a key figure in keeping costs down. However, I don't see how you can get around it until the airport and ATC infrastructure catches up with even the current reduced travel demand in this country. Oh, and btw for the poster who said ACA's Jetstream's are ancient, ACA only uses the Jetstream 41 at this time and I believe that model entered service around 1995 or so which only make them 7 years old. I think most of UA's 737-300/500's are older than that.