I Flew on an Airbus A319.... and Lived to Tell

For those of you who have visited this blog or know me at all it should come as no surprise that I love flying and anything airplane related. However I am somewhat partial to Boeing and will go way out of my way to fly on any model of their jets. I generally fly airlines that have either all Boeing or mostly Boeing fleets. My airline of choice for the last several yeas has been Delta. This was great as they operated a mostly Boeing fleet since the MD-88's they had were now considered part of Boeing after McDonnell Douglas was taken over by Boeing. I have never mined the Embraer jets that Delta's regional partners have operated either and while not a huge fan of the Bombardier CRJ's have gotten used to them as well. When Delta bought Northwest the all Boeing fleet went away as Northwest had a mixed fleet including many Airbus jets. These are now all repainted in Delta colors and the A319's are replacing many of the older less efficient MD-88's throughout the network. Delta is also using the Airbus A330 on overseas routes and also on long haul flights to Hawaii thru Atlanta. For many years I have not had any interest on flying in an Airbus. In fact the last one I flew on was an America West A321 many years back when CMH was a hub for America West. I took that flight to Las Vegas and was happy to not need the services of the Euro plane ever since. Well unfortunately this year my trip to the SCCA National Convention meant I would either have to hang out in the Atlanta airport for an extra 4 hours or swallow my pride and fly home on an Airbus A319. I did the latter....... and lived! My trip out had me on an MD-88 and then a 767-300. Returning from LAS to ATL I was jam packed into an OLD 757-200 without the video system. (yeah it had CRT monitors in the ceiling with color so washed out that skin color was green) Since I chose to fly Delta from CMH to LAS I had to give up the option of non-stop as only Southwest flies that route non-stop. If you know me then you know I will only fly SWA if they are the ONLY airline to go to the place I need to go. I refuse to fly them and happily pay much more to avoid flying with them. An interesting side note is that the non-stop flight on SWA cost more than the 1 stop on DAL. Several others went with me to the convention and all paid more. Those that bought their tickets a couple days before me paid about $15 more each way. Those that purchased on the same day as I did paid about $50 more each way, and those that purchased about 3 weeks after paid a whopping $175 more. The bonus to me was the skymiles as I'm now at 100K and am planning a trip to Hawaii. Only when researching that trip I discovered if I wanted to go thru Atlanta I'd have to fly on an........................Airbus.... Oh dear.

Nice to be home

I returned from Las Vegas late Sunday. Its so nice to be home. I enjoyed my trip, but there is something so nice about a big hug from the kids who have not seen you in a few days. Flying out I took a Delta MD-88 followed by a Delta Boeing 767-300. It was such an enjoyable trip out for a few reasons. First of all both legs out I had nobody sitting next to me! Thats right--actual room to spread out and stretch. I sat on the 2 seat side of both planes. Flying into Ls Vegas at night is always a thrill. The lights of Vegas are second to none. Finally we had the in seat entertainment units on the 4.5 hour flight and thats not always a given. Even though the TV channels were mostly dark I was able to watch a bit and play some trivia as well as use my ipods and psp to pass the time. The return flights were again on Delta and a Boeing 757-200 from LV to Atlanta followed by another MD-88 into CMH. Unfortunately for me both were filled to the max. Overbooked actually although not to the Southwest level of overbooking. After making my flight by the skin of my bones last year got to the airport early this year. To the tune of 3:45AM.....Yeah

No issues with heat this year. Just a couple of backed up commodes...... No wonder everybody was happy to see me. The Convention was good and my region produced both the Rookie of the Year as well as the Presidents Cup winner. Its a good time to be the RE.

Moving along the Oscar nominations were today and for the first time in forever I had actually seen several films that were nominated.... Up in the Air, The Lovely Bones, The Blind Side, District 9 among them. Making that even more interesting is I saw them all free over the internet. Yes that is so cool Ask me where....