Back in the air this week, first to Newark. Anyone who has flown much will tell you that ORD and EWR are two of the most delayed places in the country, and flights between the two points, in either direction, can be chaos.
Last summer I had a trip to EWR that was six hours late due to storms in the Chicago area.
So when I book this trip I always say, "be calm, don't let it get to you". So when it started to rain late last night in Chicago, I said, "don't get upset". When I got up and saw all the fog at ORD, again, I resigned myself to a big delay. Then I looked at www.fly.faa.gov/ois and saw that the average delay out of ORD was 121 minutes and building.
I kept checking the Continental web site to see if a delay was tacked on and it was not. I did not want to sit out at ORD all day, I would have rather waited it out at home, but no delay was mentioned.
Then I noticed something that Continental does that no other airline does. Their web site tells you the lanes that the actual ship has flown. And in this case, my flight came into EWR from DFW on time. And it departed EWR to come to ORD only 6 minutes late. It arrived at ORD 20 minutes late which means we left ORD 20 minutes late. Normally, I would have celebrated this, but incredibly enough we arrived at EWR 15 minutes early! Now some people will blame that on "padding" the schedule (building in delay times). I don't care! The psychology of arriving early is wonderful. The week is off to a good start, but the same rain that Chicago is having today is headed east and will be in the New York area tomorrow and I am scheduled to fly back to ORD tomorrow night. I'm gonna try to get an earlier flight. You may not be impressed but I have seen delays between ORD and EWR that were excessive and I am totally shocked that we were early. I'm attaching a pic taken out the window of Continental's President's Club at ORD; you can see how foggy things were in Chicago (and no, I never fly US Air if I can help it).
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