I hate the entire air travel industry. Seriously.
I was supposed to be able to catch a plane from Minneapolis to Atlanta, GA, and then to Newark, NJ. The first leg went fine, aside from my being stupid regarding which terminal I needed to be in. But that’s beside the point.
However, my flight into Newark has been delayed for 3 hours now, and I have no way of knowing when it’ll be allowed to take off. Granted, this time, it’s due to weather in NJ, which is not something anyone can control. That’s all fine and dandy, when launching ourselves into the air with great amounts of force, we’re sort of at the mercy of mother natures.
This isn’t really my point though. Our air-traffic control system is screwed up. This idea of hubs is not constructive. When there is bad weather in one hub, say Chicago, it affects everywhere else, because all the planes through Chicago get re-routed. This sort of idea works well enough when dealing with computer networks, but for travel, it can really throw a kink in people’s plans.
Somehow we manage to create intricate networks of roads across the entire US, but we can’t seem to figure out a decent air traffic system.
I don’t have a good answer, I’m not an air traffic engineer, just a whiny college student who has had 3+ hours in an airport to stew over this.
-JTS
