American Airlines Should Swap with JetBlue
For a story primer, there was an in flight movie on the way from Ft Myers, Florida to Dallas, Texas. Before this, I thought that "in flight movies" were something they talked about on "Madmen" and other shows set in equally ancient times-- I'm looking at you Parents! Somehow I skipped around from airline to airline with either no movie, or seatback screens, and nothing in between. But I guess that American Airlines are those "something in between" kind of people. The service was terrible, they wanted to charge me $2 for a can of soda, and were rude when I said "oh, well, nevermind". But they were playing the film "Lone Ranger", which is something I've been meaning to see for months.
The movie was suppose to run for a whole 2.5 hours, while the flight happened to be 3 hours long. This seems like good news. They started the movie just after take off, which makes perfect sense, but then-- for apparently no reason-- they stopped the movie about 30 minutes later. I was so into the film, that I could only think "wow, are we there already?". But alas, they took the time to shut the movie off, closed all of the screens, did nothing else at all, put the screens back down, and restarted the film. Now with exactly 2.5 hours left to the flight, we were going to watch a 2.5 hours flight; I see nothing wrong with this so far: "la-di-dah".
We got all-the-way to the exciting action climax stuff that every movie with guns is required to have, and POOF they shut off the damn movie again, but this time saying "we are preparing for landing". This movie was so good, and their timing was so terrible, that I swear I got cinema-blue-balls! (CBBs for short) The only other thing I can say is that I'd rather have flown Southwest for more reasons than free soda and nice people.
LAN vs the World
None of that really matters in the end, but it sets up the rest of the story about the flight down, up, and down again.
The international portion of my trip was still to come. The last time I did this, I flew with LAN Airlines, which is a member of the "OneWorld" alliance with American Airlines. LAN Airlines is singularly the best airline I have ever flown on in my life. They had the best service, the nicest people, free booze, awesome food, etc. On top of that, no one told them yet that it's misogynistic to only hire gorgeous women as your flight attendants; it was like flying PanAm on the tv show!
So I had pretty high expectations of American Airlines on this international flight. In hindsight, I can now add my story to the pool of every American who has flown with LAN and then AA; we all agree, "Don't do it! Just stick with LAN". Their flights are usually cheaper anyways, and the American flight attendants usually respond to any request as though you asked them to redirect the plane so you can get a better picture of the Grand Canyon; not that nice!
The only saving grace was that they did in fact have seatback screens-- which is mostly a given these days-- with a list of good movies. The bad part was that mine didn't work; it was black and white and kept restarting my movie. Although I asked a few times prior, this was the only way I got them to allow me to move to a different seat. After quite a little finagling, I was seated in the middle of 5 seats, 3 of which were empty. I had to wake a guy up to get over, but I apologised and it was worth it. [ If you've connected the dots, and think that maybe they weren't that nice to me because I kept asking to move from my aisle seat for almost any reason, then I have no idea what you're talking about ]
Another point of comparison, LAN Airlines has seatback touch screen displays that let you access, play, pause, fastforward, rewind, etc ANYTHING in their catalog. American Airlines has seat arm controls that let you select things from the displays, but made you wait for the next viewing, which were on 20 minute increments. Not to whine too much, but how is that a reasonable solution in modern times? I literally could have reprogrammed the control system for them in the 20 minutes I was waiting for my movie to begin. Moreover, I found out why my movie kept restarting: the system cannot handle fast forwarding or rewinding, which are default controls on the keypad.
Here's Why That Mattered
One of the selections for movies on the flight from Dallas to Santiago (9.5 hours) was none other than "Lone Ranger"; although my CBBs were still sore, I knew I had to finish at some point
Luck was on my side this time! On the flight from Florida to Texas, I missed ~10 minutes of the end of the movie: again, WTF AA! So this time, I fell asleep before I even knew the movie was on; I kept waking up every 30 minutes or so, and finally arose completely at almost EXACTLY the moment I last saw from the previous flight! I couldn't believe my luck. I watched the end, it was cute, I liked the movie-- my CBBs calmed down--, and I fell asleep again, a woefully satisfied man.
Santiago Airport
I landed at the Santiago airport (SCL) named after the pioneer of LAN airlines Arturo Merino Benitez. [If you'd like to read about it, there's some interesting heritage there: SCL Airport Wiki and LAN Airlines Wiki ]. At SCL, I had about 4 hours to kill and not enough sleep to navigate my way through a foreign airport in less time than that. Because I was transferring from American Airlines to Sky Airlines (not in the "OneWorld Alliance") to fly to the telescope directly, I had to grab my bags from international baggage claim, carry them through customs, find the Sky Airline ticket booth, and re-check them; this adds up to more reasons I don't like American Airlines. At the same time, I have to wonder: had I transferred to a LAN Airlines flight, could I have smuggled anything cool into the country? They directly implied that I would not have seen my luggage until La Serena (the telescope) if I flew on LAN; this is quite curious....
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| This is a historic picture, not a current picture! |
I have to stop and thank the ticket counter ladies at Sky Airlines, which were of course gorgeous! But that's not why. It turns out that on an international flight to/from the US, you are allowed 46kg (100 lbs) of stuff. But if you are on a domestic flight inside Chile, you are only allowed 20kg (45 lbs) of stuff, which includes your carryon luggage too. At the beginning, they were saying that I would have to pay for the extra baggage, the cost of, which I did not know until much later, would have been $160!! But when they found out that I just got off an international flight, they realised that in the US and on LAN (AA), they have very different weight policies. I can only assume that they thought I was equally as gorgeous, because they let me get away with 60 kg (132 lbs) of stuff (2 suitcases and a carry on). In the end, the entire team of them made sure I did not have to pay anything.
After this debacle, I should have taken them all out for drinks, but I needed internet to phone home; as a result, I found myself at a Starbucks (*$). That's right: I literally flew halfway across the globe, to another continent, just to use the wifi at Starbucks; I'm so ashamed. Crazy enough, I found 2 Americans there who were just passing through Chile on a tour of South America. One of which just happened to be named "Linda"; hi Mom! The fun part was that I-- after visiting Chile for only 2 weeks ever before this-- got to help them deal with the "natives", find wifi on their iphones, and discuss the nature of Chilean life.
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When my next flight to La Serena (Two Months Down South) was near, we kindly departed and I headed off in the wrong direction. I expected that I would need a power converter from American to Chilean power at the telescope. So I went to find an adapter. The duty free shop nearby had *just* the thing. It was a universal adapter from any power type to any power type; for the low low price of $40 (20.000 CLP). I found out two terrible things later: 1) The observatory facility makes it's own power, and uses the US system because we are now the standard in more than just language and money; 2) a damn US-Chilean converter costs $5 at the minimart in Santiago!
Sky Airlines
My last flight of the "day" was on Sky Airlines. They are a domestic only carrier that flies small planes on 1 - 2 hour long flights. Apparently, it is very common for business people to fly around the country for 2+ hour meetings and back again, because they are cheap, quick, and frequent. As a result, the service was *amazing*, which was topped off by the full lunch they served on the hour long flight, including a delicious chocolate covered something that I ate first!
For more from here until I returned to Santiago, read my previous entry Two Months Down South
Culture Clash
In the end, I had an inverted "culture clash". I actually came out of it liking the Chileans WAY MORE than the Americans; I blame AA for that fact, not America herself.
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