The Joys of Flight

This morning we rose at 4AM, or “oh dark thirty” to get my daughter to the Portland, ME airport for a 7AM flight to Atlanta with a connection to Fort Walton Beach, FL for an Air Force school starting tomorrow. We arrived at 5:30, looked at the arrival board to see her flight listed as “on time.” Not so fast! At the check in there was a group of tired, surly people and a handwritten sign saying the flight was cancelled. No reason given, no weather problems, my guess from the number of people, they just didn’t want to run it at a loss and were going to fill up their other, later flights. A check of the website listed the flight as canceled from Portland but on time to its Houston connection from Atlanta. Hmmm.
So the best we can do is a 3:40 PM, and reservations on the remaining two flights into Ft. Walton, in case something else goes awry. Which of course it did. The flight was boarded shortly after 3 and sat on the runway until five. So my daughter has now been up since 4 AM and will arrive too late to make any connection, which will necessitate spending the night on a bench, and will report in late and exhausted some time tomorrow.
Why can’t we do better than this? Why can’t we have high speed rail like the rest of the developed world? When you consider all the hoohah at the airports, the fact that they are outside of the cities one is trying to reach, the homeland security drills and just being yanked around by the airlines, one could get on a train, say in Boston and be in New York, downtown, in less time and be more comfortable.
That’s my rant, because I have driven to Portland twice today and feel jet lagged myself.