RANT [Definitely not] flying the friendly skies BY IAN DONNIS

OK, let me get this straight. In addition to undergoing random security inspections (two of my last three flights, including one in which air was puffed on my clothing in an elusive search for explosive residue), we now have to put up with a maddening decay in the quality of airline service?

Returning from a recent family get-together in North Carolina, the need to catch a connecting flight at Washington-Dulles wasn’t ideal, although it didn’t seem that bad at the time. That was until a dithering clerk told me how the flight was hopelessly oversold and there was no way I’d get on. Fifteen minutes later, they discovered a spare seat, so I clambered aboard, only to learn that it was all a mistake and I had to get back off. Quite a comfort, in this day and age, to see how some airline personnel are unable to reconcile the number of checked boarding passes with the quantity of seats on a plane. There was talk of putting me on a flight at 9 pm — nine hours later — to Providence.

After much back-and-forth— greased, of course, by the obligatory free pass for a subsequent domestic roundtrip flight — I received a ticket for a flight a mere three hours later to New York’s LaGuardia Airport and the promise of a 5 pm connection to T.F. Green. Upon landing in New York, it took a series of negotiations between United and US Airways to confirm what I’d been told was already confirmed for the next flight. When the time came for the trip back home, my fellow passengers and I climbed onboard and waited a good 30 minutes just to discover that a mechanical problem required scratching the trip. We were fortunate, I suppose, that there was room for us on a flight back to Providence four hours later (which left late, of course).

After taking countless flights, I couldn’t recall a single worse airline experience, and I didn’t seem to be alone. Frustrated airline passengers barely managing to control their simmering rage were all around. It could have been worse. We could have crashed or been face-to-face with terrorists.

But when it takes 12 hours — enough time to drive the distance — to complete an airplane trip between Charlotte and Boston, it’s hard not to view it as an indictment of the whole miserable US airline industry.