Letters to the Editor
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Moving Trucks
Worst: ATL. One giant Bubba act, starting when you check in with Atlanta Center until you are handed off back to Washington, Jax, or Memphis Center the next day.
The most inefficient runway and taxiway layout in the world (only Delta aircraft get to use the HOV lanes), lousy controllers, idiotic noise abatement rules, a SID scheme that changes every Jepp revision, a 20-minute train ride from the outer terminal to ground transportation, apathetic workers in every niche, lousy hotels, a lousy downtown, and lousy weather. Don't lose sight of your credit card in an airport restaurant - strange charges will appear on your next statement. An so-called international airport where only one language is spoken. Badly.
To top it off, for 20 years the airport's essential info was buried in DOD FLIP. It wasn't under A for Atlanta, H for Hartsfield, W for William B Hartsfield, or G for Georgia. It was under T. For "The." As in, "The William B Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport." Bubbas.
Bad: Orange County. Someday, some big aircraft will have an engine failure at just the wrong time during that max-power, stare-at-the-glass-so-we-don't-deviate-one-inch-from-the-prescribed-track-and-get-fined climbout and plant it right into some richnik's swimming pool.
Bad: Toronto. An hour to fly from O'Hare. Another hour to taxi to your gate at Pearson.
Bad: Phoenix. The robber-baron award. A 50 percent tax for all the stuff the locals want to build but don't want to pay for.
Bad: DFW. "American 25 heavy, y'all can taxi in front of all those other aircraft that have been waiting in line... you're cleared for takeoff, sir."
Bad: St Louis. Nice new $1 billion runway. Too bad all the airplanes left town.
Bad: Washington National. Final resting place at Arlington? Not with a jet overflying every 30 seconds. Amazing how quickly the FAA moved to reallow business jets into DCA after Sept 11th. Run a high-speed rail link to Dulles and shut that disaster down.
Bad: Philly. Whipping boy of the east coast flow. Sit too long in the takeoff queue between runways on a hot day, and your jet will sink into the asphalt and have to get towed out. The white rocking chairs were a nice touch until they all disappeared (stolen?).
OK: Denver. Ultramodern airfield design allows simultaneous ops to all 6 runways. Fog, snow, rain, wind? Nothing shuts this airport down except heavy thunderstorms, really heavy snow, or a United Airlines computer crash. Oh, wait a sec...
Good: ORD. For now. Until the state of Illinois ruins the airfield to make it look like Atlanta. World-class air traffic controllers (even if they are cranky), a roundabout-style taxi flow (works great when the crews are all on their A-game), good food, bright terminals, and a great downtown. Yeah, the weather's iffy, but ORD does the best with what it has to work with.
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Name me one major airport near a major city . . .
. . . that isn't about 30 minutes from the downtown core?
If you factor in the convenience of an airport in terms of how close it is to the metro area it's intended to service, then you have to consider Denver as pretty lousy, considering it's about 30 minutes from Denver
I've flown in and out of Denver for the last three years in January. It is no more difficult to get there than any other airport I've been to servicing a major city, and easier than most (O'Hare? JFK?). Honolulu and LAX are the only ones I've been to that are really in the city, and that's not necessarily a good thing (besides the fact that LAX sucks as much as JFK).
I think what we're seeing here domestically is that the airports getting the praise, San Francisco being the exception, are in smaller cities and not really international airports.
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Rochester Airport
I was only slightly surprised to see that Rochester was not on the list - who goes to Rochester, really? - but it was one of the most pleasant surprises in my travels. Bright and airy without being cloying, it always seems spacious even when busy. Security is as friendly as you would expect from upstate New York, and it has what I think is probably the coolest exhibit I've ever seen in an airport: The original wood and rope air traffic control tower stands in the middle of the forty foot tall concourse, looking out at the runway.
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DIA & FasTracks.
As a Denver resident, I am biased, but I just love DIA. I love driving out there and watching for the first peek at the white tented roof against the plains. For me, that's always the moment my trip begins.
That said, it is a long drive. Once you hit Pena Boulevard, you still have 10 miles to go before you hit the terminal.
Wanted to note, though, that we will be getting train service from between downtown and DIA thanks to FasTracks, a voter-approved $4.7-billion (now believed to be $6.2B), 12-year mass transit buildout. Won't be for a while, of course. 2015, if all goes well. We shall see.
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Oddly-named airports
We in Oklahoma City have Jordan beat. Our two largest airports are: Will Rogers Airport, and Wiley Post Airport. They were both killed in the same plane crash in Alaska, in a plane piloted by Post.
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Mattwa & Aptnro
I don't fly often, but the one time I was stuck in Philly was not a good experience. Air-Tran is in the midst of a hostile takeover of my hometown airline and there are ALOT of travelers here that are really pissed about it. Your description of the Philly airport is exactly how I remembered it. Maybe my local airline's quality has spoiled me somewhat but I have never witnessed such lousy customer service as US-AIR in that crappy Philly terminal. We were scheduled for a layover of little over an hour and it ended up being almost eight. Although I must say the woman at the little Chinese food cafe must have given me about $50 worth of free samples by the time we finally secured a flight out of there.
The one place I always had pretty good luck in was the airport in Minneapolis when flying Northwest(or "Northworst" as some call it). Decent enough layout for it's size and mostly friendly people working there who respond to any question no matter how dumb it might sound. I give a thumbs-up to Sky Harbor as well for the friendly rental car shuttle driver who pointed out what stop-lights we tourists didn't want to frequent for too long without running the risk of being shaken down by punks or the prostitutes that almost seemed to be right accross the street from the main terminal. The locals all laughed it off as being the airport's "main entertainment". It almost made the departure from Chicago's Midway(an airport that has the look and feel of a grade school cafeteria basement with a bad paint job) worth it. Nothing like taking off in a Midwestern January blizzard and touching down in the 70 degree Arizona night.