Rich Mintz  

If you’re looking for the free JFK motorcycle parking, it’s at the Lefferts Boulevard AirTrain station. Here’s a map showing how to get there from the southbound Van Wyck:

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And here’s a helmet-cam video showing the way:

Free motorcycle parking is provided courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Tell the Port Authority you appreciate it, and tell your friends to use it.

I’m sitting on a Delta shuttle from O’Hare back to New York (on which a toddler, roughly 2 years old, keeps shouting “Party!” over and over for no apparent reason), and I feel I should write something brief about two unexpected developments: the recovery of Delta from its turn-of-the-millennium squalor, and the consistently pleasant airport experience provided by the city of Chicago.

First, Delta. (And i realize that this flight is operated by Shuttle America, but they’re carrying the Delta livery and flying as part of an integrated system, so hear me out.)

My memory is faulty, but I’m pretty sure this Delta Shuttle i’m flying today is the one that used to be the Pan Am shuttle, and so once upon a time it had some glamour, but Pan Am closed down in 1991 or so (I flew it on its final weekend, from Mexico City back to Los Angeles) and for most of the ensuing dozen years the shuttle service was increasingly dismal. A decade later, when I was living in Atlanta and Delta was my hometown airline, I rooted for them partly out of pride, but the Delta flying experience was pretty glum around the turn of the century: sullen flight attendants, poor inflight service, cracked upholstery and broken armrests, unreliable departures and arrivals.

Then things started to change for the better, 7 or 8 years ago. Some of it had to do with Delta Technologies, which has always run a good logistics operation and for more than a decade now has run a great website, along with excellent kiosks and other electronic customer services. But that can’t explain it all, because some of the magic is back, too. The staff, by and large, seem happy again, even at La Guardia (the sullenest in the national network of sullen airports). The uniforms are brighter. I’m flying on an Embraer jet that smells like it just came out of the factory last week. There’s free beer and wine in coach, for those who are into that. For about the 5th time in a row, we’re arriving on time. And on this Chicago flight, I paid what I think of as a competitive airfare — well under $400 round trip, booked just 2 days before.

Now, yes, yes, I know, not mainline service, Shuttle. But still. My recent encounters with Delta mainline have also been positive. (Incidentally, Hartsfield-Jackson is looking good. It’s still one of the best-run airports in America.) In general, dealing with Delta these days, you have the feeling you’re dealing with a competent organization. And as small a thing as that sounds, when we didn’t reliably have it for all those years, its absence was felt.

Now, the Chicago airports. You already know I love Midway. And for my entire adult life, everyone I know has loved to hate on O’Hare. But why? Yes, it’s big, that’s a given. And it has its bad days. But the food and beverage options are excellent (lentil salad from Argo Tea on my tray table), there’s some interesting retail, and the city has put a lot of money into airport arts. Not to mention that you can go door-to-counter from the Loop in less than an hour for $2.25 on a single train. In the Delta gate area today, seating was ample and well-lit, there were electrical outlets all over the place (including USB charging stalks) — nothing to complain about. I even saw a TSA supervisor scolding a TSA agent for a small customer-unfriendly infraction (cutting in line during a customer service encounter).

A few comments on TSA airport screening, since it’s something I’ve bitched about in the past:

1. It does all feel incrementally less arbitrary and ridiculous than it did a year ago. Sure, there are new arbitrary and ridiculous aspects about it (the ban on toner cartridges in carry-on baggage, for instance, which is pretty much the dictionary definition of “that cow is out of the barn”), but on the whole things are running more smoothly, and the staff seem more professionalized than they were a year or two years ago.

2. The TSA, and Americans, have both survived the coming of the “naked X-ray machine,” and on the whole I don’t think civil liberties have been impacted overmuch. I’ve been through the thing (once). If it actually does improve the likelihood of catching the bad guys, you know, fine. I can handle it. But then I generally believe that government action in pursuit of the collective welfare (i.e., not being blown up) is a good thing, and am not particularly concerned about some bored public servant accidentally seeing the shape of my buttocks.

3. The TSA has accepted that “opting out” in favor of a patdown search is a basic right; in most terminals I’ve been through (not all) that option is clearly posted for travelers; and staff seem to have been trained well on the whole.  I’ve been patted down in a dozen airports, always professionally, usually with a ridiculously excessive amount of formulaic preamble. (For the record, in every other country in the world, including the United Kingdom, if a security officer wants to pat you down, they just, you know, do it. They don’t recite you list of apologetic questions first about your “sensitive areas”; they just swipe their hands over said areas to make sure you’re not, uh, carrying anything there that you shouldn’t be, and then we all go on with our lives.)

4. Obviously someone determined to hide a plastic razor blade (or whatever) on their person can probably find a way, but the point of an institutionalized patdown search isn’t to find every potential tool of mayhem, it’s to increase the likelihood of an object’s being found to a sufficient degree that mayhem on an aircraft becomes less attractive to a doer of mayhem than alternative non-aircraft sorts of mayhem are.

5. There’s clearly more of two things going on: random extra checks (I’ve been subjected them twice in 3 months, after never ever being subjected to them before, and it’s not because I now profile more like a bad guy than I used to); and scrutiny of your bags on the X-ray monitor. My Compass iPad easel (which apparently looks on X-ray like a dangerous long metal object) almost always gets my bag hand-searched if I forget to take it out and open it up for its trip through security.

6. The “take off your shoes” thing? Still stupid. The “liquids” thing? Still stupid. But, ehh, hard to get all bent out of shape about it.

7. Finally: We as a society have decided that not being blown up in the air is our collective priority. We might instead have decided that reducing the horrific total of Americans killed and maimed in automobile “accidents” was our collective priority — in a rational world, we almost certainly would have — but we went the other way, and given that we have, airport screening necessarily follows. In this context, it’s worth observing at this point that it is in our national interest for TSA screeners — who are, after all, doing an important job on which public safety depends — to be proud of their uniforms. They should be trained, treated, and paid as public servants, given the respect of the uniform, and held to a high but not unachievable standard of professionalism. “Respect” doesn’t mean kowtowing, it means appreciation of the fact that they are earning their living in a way that contributes directly to the public welfare, and with proper training and funding are capable of excelling in their work and being proud of it. We get the public servants that we deserve.

I’m writing this on my second of six United Airlines/United Express flights booked in a 10-day period.  I’m not usually a United flier, but I happened to end up with a tight series of travel that involved a lot of time in Chicago, so United made sense.

No, this post isn’t about how they broke my guitar or lost my luggage or parked me in the back of the plane between a baby and a vomiting old woman.  (There is a baby right behind me, but she’s sleeping like an angel.) Quite the opposite.

My airline loyalty (to the extent that I have one, given that I’m price-sensitive, schedule-dependent, and not particularly persnickety about service or amenities) has been to Delta, out of habit and because I used to live in Atlanta, a city that depends on Delta as an economic engine far more than it likes to admit.  There are things Delta does quite well, for example virtually everything that the exceptionally well-run Delta Technology division touches: their website and online services are probably the best of any of the US major carriers, their kiosk is superbly usable, and their inflight wifi, where it’s available, is simple and reliable.  Besides, I’ve had that SkyMiles American Express card forever.  Also, the Biscoff cookies.

But I have to say, after only 15 minutes on this United Express Embraer 175 regional jet, with upgraded seats that sure feel like leather, professional service, and an on-time departure, I’m pretty sure I’ll never fly Delta Connection again, and that’ll impact my long-haul bookings, too.

(You may be familiar with the Delta Connection experience at La Guardia, involving a long, long walk followed by a trip downstairs to pack onto a bus, which sits in the sun for 10 minutes and then drives you to a plane parked 50 yards away, where a surly young woman who slept in an airport lounge directs you to a bench upholstered in 2 millimeters of burlap and throws a sack of peanuts at you.)

The United facilities at every airport I use (save LAX, which will feel like a bus terminal no matter how much beige marble they put in) are pretty nice, and the Continental merger (with their institutional emphasis on service) will probably make United better over time.  I also like the fact that they routinely offer the “extra legroom” Economy Plus upgrade at check-in (an affordable luxury that makes a material difference to a supersized person like myself).

Tomorrow night I’m flying overnight to London on United, which will be my first transatlantic trip on a US carrier in more than 10 years.  (That time, I flew Delta from Dulles, and then returned on Air France. I think before that, my last transatlantic crossing on a US carrier was on TWA, which dates me, doesn’t it?)  I’m looking forward to comparing the service to that on Virgin Atlantic, which I would call “perky and good-natured, but a bit ragged.”  I’m also curious about whether my middle seat way in the back of the plane will be as awful as I suspect.  Stay tuned.

Since (thanks to weather) I have 2 unexpected hours to kill in the United pier of LGA’s central terminal — one of the least pleasant places I can think of to spend 2 hours, but nothing to be done about that now — I’ll offer you a few brief notes about today’s airport experience:

I scared the TSA by accident

Apparently the Compass iPad stand, when folded and stowed in your bag, looks like a shiv on X-ray. My bag got stared at on the X-ray, then searched, then stared at on X-ray again, then searched again. It wasn’t until five minutes had gone by that I realized I had an idea what they were looking for.

Unfortunately, if you ask a TSA agent “what are you looking for?” he isn’t going to tell you, so I tried again with “there’s a steel iPad stand folded up in there that probably showed up as a long, thin metal object.” That enabled him to find it in the bag and I was sent on my way.

Skype is changing more than voice calling

I’ll have more to say soon about Skype 5 — which I downloaded over the weekend — as I start rolling it into my everyday life. I no longer have a landline, iPhone call quality is spotty, and even the voice quality over VoIP in my office leaves something to be desired, so given that Skype tends to deliver better-than-the-available-phone-options voice quality, I’ve been using it more. Now that it supports multi-way video calling, I have even more reasons to play with it.

But the aspect of Skype 5 I’m most surprised and pleased by is what they’re calling Skype Access, which is basically the ability to use your Skype credit balance, via Skype’s billing system, to pay by the minute to use public wi-fi networks (such as Boingo Wireless in the airport) that were previously available only by daily or monthly subscription. If you keep the Skype menu in your menu bar or your system tray, like I do, this means that whenever you’re within range of a commercial public network (which includes most of the time I find myself looking for a quick fix of Internet access, except when I’m actually in motion), instant-on pay-by-the-minute access is just a pulldown away.

The per-minute cost is high-ish, in the range of $10-12/hour (promoted at 14 cents, but I was actually just charged 19 cents, presumably including taxes). But on the other hand, if you keep your eye on the meter, and stay disconnected except during the minutes you actually need data, it can be convenient — and for short bursts of Internet, it’s certainly cheaper than paying by the hour.

I’ve never been much of a customer of pay-by-the-hour wireless providers, because I usually feel either ripped off (because I don’t use anywhere near an hour), or forced to make a commitment to a longer-term plan without knowing whether it’s justified. Using this kind of plan, even if I pay more, I feel better, because I’m controlling my own spend. Everyone wins here: Skype sees me spend down my balance faster, the ISP gets a premium rate from a customer who otherwise wouldn’t bother, and I get the few minutes of Internet I needed without having to spend a fortune.

In practice I’ll rarely use this (I carry a mobile hotspot), but it’s great to know it’s here, and I’ll certainly use it occasionally. And as free wireless becomes more ubiquitous, I may ditch the wireless hotspot entirely and just try to go with Skype. God knows I’m tired of paying separately for quadruply (now quintuply) redundant Internet access which I can’t possible eat all of at once — but that’s a topic for another post.