A Warning: Jet Blue

Think, people. Think very hard before you sign up for JetBlue's nonstops from Boston to the West Coast. It turns out that their planes do not have enough fuel to get to the West Coast when the headwinds are strong.

Thus a six hour flight that would be turned into a six and a half hour flight by strong headwinds is instead turned into an eight hour flight by an involuntary refueling stop in Salt Lake City.

And then--because whoever runs Oakland operations for JetBlue does not have an arrangement with Southwest to use some of its open gates--the fact that we were late kept us on the tarmac for 45 minutes waiting for a JetBlue plane departing Oakland to push back from its gates. Flight attendants responded to questions from our seat neighbors about what was going on by telling them that they should call JetBlue on their cell phones: that the flight attendants knew nothing and weren't going to take any steps to find out.

And then--presumably because JetBlue hadn't sprung for overtime for baggage handlers--it took forty five minutes after we docked at the gate for our luggage to arrive on the carousel.

So it was your standard late-plane experience: you talk to the spouse, talk to the kids, march up and down the aisle, sit in sullen silence, watch Hellboy read the truly excellent Hour of the Octopus by Joel Rosenberg--a fantasy detective story set in a version of feudal Japan--talk to your neighbors, and finally stagger out of the airport four hours after you were supposed to arrive.

JetBlue won't tell me how often this unscheduled-refueling-in-Salt-Lake-City happens, or why their Oakland operation doesn't seem to have a plan for when it does.

Think carefully, people. Think carefully.