Nothing worse than late at night and you’re about to hop on the plane from Sydney to Melboure and, ahh shit, its landing in Avalon.
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There’s this jerk who’ll shoot you soon as look at you in Mos Eisley…
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I’ll be careful.
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Everybody says that.
…if I had a peggat for every time I heard that, I wouldn’t have to be a bounty hunter…
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You’ll be bumped!!
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I thought it was the place you went if you wanted to have an anal probe by a low paid, angry dude…
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The biggest problem for Laguardia that I had was just it was so far from everything. Newark Airport is awful to be in, but once you leave it’s easier to get elsewhere. That is probably how they’ve been able to get away with it sucking so bad so long.
Yeah Newark is also a bit easier to get into, out of and around (before you actually enter) than Laguardia. Even to a certain extent JFK. When I was kid growing up on Long Island my family used to actually fly out of Newark when ever anyone flew international. It was often a lot easier to simply drive around the city and through to NJ than it was to work your way through Brooklyn and Queens to either of NY’s airports. These days Newark is dodgy enough and JFK has improved enough that we just go that route. But the only person I know who’s used Laguardia in the last decade or so only does so because he happens to live about 15 minutes from there by cab/car. But Laguardia’s also a complete shit show inside, and has a really problematic runway situation. There’s been a long standing debate (since I was a kid) about whether to renovate to fix it or to just tear that shit down. It just surpises me that Newark would get to be worse. Maybe its a terrible place to be, but it functions as an airport Laguardia increasingly doesn’t.
And god forbid you pause for longer than it takes your passenger to fling himself bodily from your vehicle as you do a California Rolling Stop in the Loading Zone. You park there for literally 10 seconds and they are screaming at you to move your vehicle.
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+1 on Long Beach (boarding & deplaning on both ends of the fuselage! Walking across the tarmac!), but JetBlue seems determined to get rid of everything that makes it any better than traditional airlines.
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I like how they put the restaurant’s seating area right below the loudspeaker that constantly bleated “Caution! The moving walkway is now ending. Caution! The moving walkway is now ending…” But that was in 2004.
My last arrival at BWI was enough for me to put it at the top of the shitlist. Plane arrives, disengorges passengers at the same time that other planes arrived. Nothing unusual about that, I guess. But then everyone’s waiting for the parking shuttle which, when it shows up, is already full. Then the rent-a-car shuttle driver takes it out on the parking shuttle driver by stopping his bus diagonally across the lane, so that none of the (full) parking shuttles can leave. Punkasses…
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I always thought that, strictly speaking, that was a parking fee, whether you parked or not – before they built the north-south freeways on either side of the airport, some people would cut through the airport to get to North Dallas via 635. Essentially you were paying a private sector operator for the privilege of driving on a public road (which, I guess foreshadows how all new highways in TX work these days). Now the toll authority’s Toll Tag works at the gates but, still, it’s for parking charges.
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STT used to share that distinction until the late 1970s. (I gather there are other “Black Stars” but I don’t know where.) The runway wasn’t even 5000 feet, with the Caribbean at one end and a mountain at the other, and airliners had to have an extra (or a stronger) brake installed in the nose gear. After the AA crash in '77 they lengthened it to 7000 ft (in one direction – the other still has a long displaced threshold).
The DCA approach you’re talking about is only from the north, IIRC, but to me it never seemed much different from flying into LGA over Flushing Bay.
DFW and MCI as well. MCI makes even more sense in that context, and very little sense post-1973 (which @TobinL beat me to)
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That was my first glimpse of New York when we moved there in '77. We’d been living in SoCal where it seemed like nothing was more 20 years old, and much of it a lot less than that. I couldn’t believe anything could look that old and still be functional (not just LGA, but looking east of it toward the Hell Gate and Triboro Bridges etc.) Of course I quickly grew to love LGA and all things related to commercial aviation.
Rail service to DIA does not start until Spring 2016. Once operational, it will be about a 40 min ride to Union station in downtown Denver.
It’s funny to me how nobody has said SLC but some of the politicians here are raring to tear it down because they somehow think ultra nasty pickled salty swampland is valuable?
DFW also predates the dominance of the hub-and-spoke system that arose in the aftermath of airline deregulation. Man do I hate changing planes in Dallas. I’ve never had the (dis?)pleasure of going through MCI so I can’t comment there.
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I live in the area. They still charge you the “Passing through” rate if you want to do that, but even to come onto the property and not park at all (i.e. Picking someone up from the airport) you still have to pay the toll when you leave.
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“Plane arrives, disengorges passengers”
So the in flight entertainment was really, really good, then abruptly ended upon arrival?
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