I flew on JetBlue last night, and had one of those mildly unfortunate experiences we’ve come to expect in air travel: The plane sat on the tarmac at JFK for a long time waiting for a cleared runway — a bit too long, as it turns out. While we were waiting, the pilot “timed out” — exceeding the amount of time he could spend, under FAA regulations, before taking a break between flights.<\/p>\n
This added nearly two hours to the flight time, since we needed to go back to the gate, locate a different pilot, and then wait for all the paperwork to be done. If we had taken off five minutes sooner, we would have saved those two hours.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, if our first pilot hadn’t “timed out” while waiting for that runway slot, the plane might have been flown across the country by a very tired pilot. So the way things work out was probably for the best.<\/p>\n
I didn’t think much of this at the time. In recent years, air travel has become one long exercise in patience and acceptance of inconvenience. On the way off the plane, I joked about it to the flight attendants — I complimented the airline on providing “the greatest number of pilots I’ve ever had on a flight.”<\/p>\n
But then today I got a very nice email from JetBlue apologizing for the inconvenience, and offering a $50 credit toward any future JetBlue flight. So I started investigating on-line, because I was curious to see whether they were obligated to do this. <\/p>\n
And no, it turns out they are not. This was just their way of apologizing for customer inconvenience, even though nothing that had happened was actually their fault.<\/p>\n
I wish more companies were so gracious to their customers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I flew on JetBlue last night, and had one of those mildly unfortunate experiences we’ve come to expect in air travel: The plane sat on the tarmac at JFK for a long time waiting for a cleared runway — a bit too long, as it turns out. While we were waiting, the pilot “timed out” … Continue reading “Unexpected graciousness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15315"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15316,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15315\/revisions\/15316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}