the trouble with turboprops

A friend of mine has recently returned from a trip to West Africa, after a delayed Royal Air Maroc flight. I've had some adventures with Royal Air Maroc myself, and though I haven't yet heard his story I am inspired to tell mine.

I was flying from Boston to Morocco to visit a friend. Lufthansa flies to Casablanca and Tangiers with one change of plane, in Frankfurt. Iberia flies to several destinations in Morocco with a change in Madrid. The only nonstop from the US to Morocco is on Royal Air Maroc, which flies from New York to Casablanca and will ticket from Boston, Montreal, or Washington DC via a code-share with American. I decided that if I was going to get stuck someplace I wanted it to be someplace I could speak the language, and booked my flights accordingly.

Everything went smoothly on the way there and almost all the way back. Casablanca's airport is capable of dealing with much more traffic than was present at the time (nearly a decade ago) and the R.A.M. 747, though aged, had no problems in either direction. The return flight was during Ramadan and I was amused that the long-journey fasting exception applied to alcohol served on the flight as well. I was worried about my 90-minute connection to a different terminal in JFK, but cleared customs in New York in plenty of time to make it onto the last leg, an American Eagle ATR-42. An hour or so into the flight -- just past Hartford -- the airplane lost a generator on one of the two engines. No problem; there are two generators on board. But once a generator has gone, it has to be fixed before the next time the airplane can take off. And American doesn't have ATR maintenance facilities in Boston, only New York. They could have paid someone else to fix the plane in Boston. But it was cheaper to turn around, fly back to New York, and put the bunch of us on a shuttle flight. So back to New York we went. Of course the shuttles fly out of Laguardia, not Kennedy, so we got to endure a chartered bus ride through Queens as well.

Needless to say, I now avoid turboprops (along with checked baggage, running to make connections, and taking the last flight of the day, all of which have stories associated with them) whenever I can. The next time I flew across the Atlantic from Kennedy, I made my connecting flights on TWA, which flies regional jets. And as a bonus, I got to enjoy Eero Saarinen's wonderful architecture along the way.

by popular demand: traveling lessons learned early in life

In the spring of my 17th year, I traveled (solo) from Los Angeles to the Bay Area and New England to visit colleges. The trip entailed too many stops to be economical to book as a single itinerary in those days of fare regulation, but I found a cheap fare to San Francisco and gave up non-stop flights in order to save some money on an open-jaw flight from there to New York and Boston.

An aside: as I wasn't old enough to have a credit card yet, I bought the ticket by walking into the Pasadena office of American Airlines with $480 in sequenced twenty-dollar bills. I don't know what would happen if I tried that today. Do airlines even have local offices any more?

The trip back was a marathon 20-hour trip beginning in rural Vermont by bus and involving a change of planes in Chicago and a change of airlines in San Francisco before finally returning home. I had quite a bit of stuff with me: clothes for two different climates, promotional material from the colleges, random gifts from east-coast relatives, and so on. And I was used to checking bags for cross-country trips; they weren't made lightly in a family of four. So at the risk of missing the connection at SFO while waiting for luggage, I checked a great big bag at Logan airport.

Immediately upon getting on my first of three flights for the day, I realized my mistake. The airplane was nearly empty, and after a stop in Chicago, it was continuing... to LAX! Airlines weren't paranoid enough to count passengers back then, and I'd surely have been able to get away with staying on the plane. But while I'd have gotten home six hours sooner, my luggage would have been stranded in San Francisco. So I got off the plane I wanted to be on, and got on the one with my bag in it. Sure enough, it made the connection and popped out the baggage claim, the one time I'd wished it wouldn't have.

SFO is a huge semicircle of gates and gate complexes, curving just enough to keep the sightlines down but not so much that you can really make a shortcut across it. It takes about five minutes by careening Smarte Carte to travel from American Airlines at one end of it to Alaska Airlines at the other. Not a measurement I imagine the folks at the airport wish to have recalibrated.

And so (o best beloved) the reason I don't check bags is the opposite of what you'd expect: I've only ever been burned by my bags ending up in the right place.

my return from the land of the southern cross

So ( this story )

has not one but three traveling lessons:

• Never take the last flight of the day
  
• Never run for a plane
  
• Never assume a train is running on time