Blair A. Schumann

I just returned from a trip from Phoenix and flew US Airways.  Never again will I.  The flight there was no problem, a perfect flight.  But the return flight is where everything falls apart.  The Flight was supposed to leave for Milwaukee at 6:40pm.  As soon as I arrived, it was delayed to 7:40pm due to a delay from the incoming aircraft.  Okay, I can live with that.  We were supposed to board that flight at 7:20pm, but didn’t until about 8.  Around 8:30 and after taxiing almost all the way, we are alerted that there was a hydraulic leak in the right wing.  We went back to have it checked out.  About 15 minutes later, they told us we would need to switch planes.  Again, no problem with me; I’d rather be on a safe plane and delayed than an unsafe one.  We reboarded and flew out around 10:00pm Arizona time.  When we reached the Chicago area, there were massive storms not allowing us entry to Milwauakee, so they circled O’hare for about 20 minutes while talking to ATC.  Eventually they decided to land at O’Hare.  We had to descend through a probable severe thunderstorm, and got thrown all around (which I liked, it was an adrenaline rush!)  Once we landed, we were forced to stay on the tarmac because the rain and lightning was so intense that no one was leaving any of the gates.  We stayed there for 2 hours (3:00am to 5:00am central time) before the storms subsided.  During this there was almost 4 inches of rain on the tarmac and cloud to ground lightning, a massive storm.  We were told by the captain that we were going to be given accommodations, which we all thought meant hotels.  Apparently it meant nothing.  We were told to go to baggage claim, which was about 2 miles away.  When we got there, all of our baggage was on the carousals waiting to be grabbed.  Around 5:30am we were told that we were going to be bussed to MKE, and the busses should be there around 6:45am.  Come 7:15am they still weren’t around.  The guy who told us about the busses then said that they would have a plane ready to board in 30-45 minutes.  Great, we all thought.  Well, we had to get hand written boarding passes, and go though the TSA checkpoint again, which was a complete waste of time.  Then we had to hike back to the same area we had just come from 2 hours earlier.  When we got there, we sat and were notified about 30 minutes later that our flight was moved to a different gate.  We moved there. Finally around 9:00am we were boarded onto that plane, flight 9030.  After everyone had gotten on, about 9:30am we taxied out.  We were then told, yet again, that we couldn’t take off due to weather.  We  waited about 2 hours, until 11:00am, and decided to head back to the gate. We then disembarked yet again. We were given the option of waiting for the plane to take off (which it may never do) or getting a bus.  Most people headed to the bus.  We had to go back to the same baggage area a second time to get our checked baggage. We then got vouchers that would get us on the busses free, but not guarantee us seats.  We waited about an hour and a half until 1:10pm for the MKE bus to come and luckily most of us got on (others had chosen other ways or stayed  the flight out.)  We finally got going and got back to MKE around 3:00pm or so.  All in all a horrible experience that I will not soon forget.  Now, I do understand that the airlines have no control over the weather, and this has nothing to do with that.  The staff were all very unaccommodating, most were rude, and very snippy to us.  They were just pushing us along, and I believe lied to us many times. I will never fly US Airways again due to the fact that they were very rude to all of us and didn’t seem to care aside from this one Manager at O’Hare whose name escapes me.  They should have gotten us all on busses at 7am and left it at that.  We would have been back in MKE around 9am, not 3pm.