Cycle Quark

I took Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Islip recently. It was my time in the relatively new Southwest terminal at BWI. Most of the gates had a power bar set up where you could plug in your laptop and work while you waited. I had seen something similar at O’Hare, but there were many more of these and they were right at the gate.

I have a Boingo on the Go account and Boingo wireless was available, so I was able to get about an hour’s worth of work done.  I was there quite early since I was worried about rush hour traffic and I left early. However, traffic was just fine.

I also had a good experience at the Madison, WI airport. I had a long delay, so I waited outside the security area, where they had a vary comfortable waiting area with comfortable leather chairs and plenty of power. Wireless was available, but I was surprised that there was a charge. I had seen lists of free wireless at airports and most of them were smaller like Madison.

Yesterday when I was returning home from Chicago, I saw a new feature at O’Hare airport. By gate B14 there are is a small installation with four stools and eight power outlets. It is meant to allow people to charge their laptops and cell phones. It seems like a great idea to me, but they need one at every gate not just one.

I arrived at Dulles Airport today on a United flight from Oakland, CA. I stepped off the plane at 3:10 PM and I left the parking garage at 4:10 PM. The airport was not very crowded. It was much more crowded on Monday when I flew out of town. There was no line today for the shuttle from the terminal back to baggage claim. When I arrived at the terminal on Monday the shuttle was greeted by a very large crowd waiting to board it. The longest time was spent waiting for my suitcase to arrive at baggage claim. I checked my bag due to the new no-carry-on-liquids rule.

I took my first flight in the no carry-on liquid era. It is clear to me that the airlines and the terminal operators have not yet learned how to adjust on the fly to changing regulations. When I arrived at Dulles for my flight, the check-in line for United was badly backed up. I waited in line for awhile until a United employee came, sorted out the line, and directed us to a variety of shorter correct lines. Apparently one line got badly backed up, and that prevented people from seeing that the other lines were not backed up.

Much of this congestion seemed to be related to people checking luggage that they would not normally check. I checked my bag, since I prefer to extra room when flying a coast to coast. This allowed me to pack toothpaste and shampoo. For my next flight to Chicago I will have to choose between bringing those items or carrying my overnight bag abroad.

There seemed to be an inconsistency in the policies. You are not allowed to carry liquids through security, but you can purchase then in the terminal. I had coffee, while I waited. I did not finish it in time, and I had to throw it away. You cannot carry the coffee on the plane, but there is no check of your carry on luggage at the gate. I could have carried on a bottle of water in my briefcase without anyone noticing.

Both government bureaucracies and large customer service businesses work best with standard procedures that can be slowly refined over time. Neither is good at adapting quickly to new situations, which does not bode well for comfortable air travel in the future.

I am at CERN, and I have spent the last three days getting a whirlwind tour of the detectors and the accelerator. Most of the detector components have been built and have arrived here for assembly. The number of people here has exploded as physicists from all over the world have arrived to install and commission their detectors. I have taken about 80 photos so far, but I thought I would start out with a small selection.

We arrived just before the CMS detector was to be closed for a test of it magnet. You can still see the inner detector in this photo. The cylinder inside the octagonal structure is a solenoid magnet. Inside that is the hadron calorimeter. The tracking detector is not yet installed. It is a large detector as you can see from the people standing in the lower right corner.

The ATLAS detector is even bigger than the CMS detector. It is being assembled underground, and I had trouble taking a picture that could truly capture its size. This is the shaft that parts of the detector are lowered down. The detector is 100 meters below the surface, This provides shielding from the radiation produced by the accelerator.

I got a tour of the accelerator also. The US contributions to accelerator were mostly in the interaction regions. Here I am in front of a quadrupole magnet built by Fermilab which has been installed in the accelerator. I am on the left.

Soem airlines are hoping to improve the rugby scrum that they called boarding. Of course they are not doing this to make your flight more pleasent. They are doing it to improve profitability. 

"An airplane that spends an hour on the ground between flights might fly five trips a day," he explains. "Cut the turnaround time to 40 minutes, and maybe that same plane can complete six or seven flights a day." More flights mean more paying passengers, and ultimately, more revenue.

The problem will be the frequent flyers. They want to sit in the front, so they can get off first. They want to have a place to store their carry on bag and it should be be very close to their seat, so they want to get on early. All of the schemes seem to rely on boarding people in the back early and then moving forward. There are some that rotate from back to front to keep people who are getting seated to be as far away from each other as possible.

Technorati Tags: Travel

I believe that that all bloggers eventually write about their travel
experiences, such as here, here, here, here, here, and here. Some people write about the wonderful places they have gone, the interesting people they have met, and the fantastic meals they have had. Others write about the horrors that have been inflicted on them by airlines, surly customs officials, poorly managed hotels, unpredictable weather, and germs that new to their gastric systems. My stories are of the second variety. I rarely travel for pleasure, but work has kept me accumulating at least enough frequent flyer miles to make the lowest tier of premium traveler status year after year.

I write this sitting in the C terminal of Reagan National Airport. My flight to Chicago is delayed due to thunderstorms between here and Chicago. The weather here has been fine since I arrived, but we were told that bad thunderstorms are about to descend on us. If they pass through quickly enough and the plane from Chicago can land, unload, be serviced, loaded, and be ready to take before 10:00 PM we will be able to go to Chicago today. It turns out that travel to Chicago is much worse in the summer than in the winter. Thunderstorms are much more disruptive to air traffic than snow is, but it is surprising that they are this bad in April. I usually think of the spring as the relatively simple time to travel.

10:00 PM and we left boarded about 11:30 PM. Apparently not everything wasLet me start with an annoying but not traumatic story. The details are a little sketchy since this trip is not burned into my memory like the real horrors. I was flying from Chicago to Pittsburgh after a visit to Fermilab. Normally I flew USAir between those two cities, but I had decided to try something different, and I made a reservation on American Eagle to fly on one of the new commuter jets that had just gone into service. It was the last flight out, which I try not take when returning home. Any problems with the plane or the weather and you are stuck out of town. There was a problem with the plane this time and we sat and waited. It was scheduled to leave about fixed and we sat on the plane for about an hour with air-conditioning before we took off. We were about 30 minutes from Chicago when the pilot announced that he had an equipment problem and was turning back to Chicago. When we landed all of the regular gate agents had gone home and there was only one person left to rebook everyone on other flights. I got out of there about 3:00 AM, found a hotel for a few hours sleep before heading back to the airport for my eventual return to Pittsburgh. Next time my first and last trip to Brazil.