A couple of weeks ago I received a message from the owner of this MySpace page asking me to join her crusade against US Air. While I was impressed by her initiative, and understood her feelings, it had been almost a year since my last horrible US Air experience. I had forgotten how bad they are, and my own statement imploring others to never, ever fly US Air.

Well, yesterday I had to fly to Asheville, North Carolina for a conference. I was speaking at 9 AM this morning. My flight was supposed to leave Dulles at 4:00 yesterday, so I headed to the airport around 2:30.

I ended up leaving almost an hour late because the inbound flight was delayed leaving Dayton, OH. These things happen, so no big deal, right?

When I arrived in Charlotte for my connection, it too was delayed creating a 3 1/2 hour layover (even after my one-hour inbound delay. Since Asheville is only about 2 hours from Charlotte, I figured I’d simply rent a car and drive. I approached the gate agent and asked to have them pull my bag so I could grab a rental car.

Here’s where the story goes from simply pedestrian to tragically ironic.

The gate agent told me that my bag could not be taken out of the stream because it had already been routed to the holding area for my connecting flight. They assured me that doing so meant my bag would arrive at my destination.

See where this is going?

It didn’t… I arrived at my destination after 10:00pm (8 hours from DC to Asheville BY AIR – a new record). My bag however, went into some sort of luggage limbo. After a half-hour trying to explain the concept of a missing bag to the gate agent in Asheville, the guy next to me indicated he was also waiting for an errant bag – and had been since Wednesday (5 days).

I did without the bag, grabbed some new clothes for my meeting, and headed back to the airport at 10:00 AM this morning. upon check-in, I asked them to check the status of my bag. It had not been located, let alone routed to Asheville.

After a half hour flight delay leaving Asheville, and another hour delay due to a blown air conditioner in Charlotte, I was batting .1000 for late flights on this trip – and all of them were due to mechanical problems (nice reliable fleet, huh?)

The US air lost baggage tracking system tells me they have found my bag, but not where it is or when I can expect it.

Under most circumstances, I’d say this was an unbelievably bad trip, but it’s par for the course on US Air.

After spending 25 hours of my life trying to get home, I got a particular kick out of my friend Melissa’s suggestions for air travel safety. I’m not sure that I would ever fly if I had to wear a surgical gown and get a full cavity search, but her suggestions deserve consideration.

Usually the way corporate mergers work is a good, solid airline will buy up a smaller, crappy airline and the smaller crappy airline will be brought up to the standards of the better airline. It appears that hasn’t happened in the US Air/AmericaWest merger.

If you have ever flown AmericaWest, you know how bad they were pre-merger. It actually appears that they were so horrible they have actually sucked US Airways into the toilet with them.

On our flight to NM last week, they decided to sit me, Mrs. Quip, and baby Quip in three different rows, all in middle seats. Unfortunately, baby quip is 15 months old, so that presented a problem. Normally the gate agents would happily reassign the seats, or at the very least, ask the other passengers if they would help accommodate at least the mother and child… But not the new US Air. Nope. Their reply was, verbatim, “Well there’s nothing we can do for you.”

I could write that off, but then the flight back became even better. They cancelled our flight due to weather problems. No biggie. That happens all the time. But then the gate agent sent everyone back to the ticket counter to rebook… Except the ticket counter was closed, and nobody was available to help until they called in some agents from home.

So now I am waiting for my rebooked flight, and it’s delayed for 90 minutes because they have to bring in a crew from somewhere else. Fortunately my layover in Phoenix is better than 3 hours, so I should make my flight to DC.

Let my life serve as a cautionary tale. Never fly US Air…