FL is AirTran (from their roots in Florida) and WAS the code for the “old” Frontier that merged into PeoplExpress years ago.

F9 is the “new” Frontier, that currently operates with Airbus equipment with animal photos on the tail.

Southwest is WN, JetBlue is B6, and HP was America West.

Time to do my penance by reading old copies of the OAG.

Northwest (NW) was the unwanted impetus for the proposed “Passengers Bill of Rights”. The Big 6 airlines rushed to try to put in customer service “standards” to head off Federal intervention. It worked.

I agree that the F9 CoC is completely one-sided in favor of the airline. Allow me to post the relevant section from the NW CoC, which is vastly different, (pardon the all caps, but that’s a result of cut & paste):

http://www.nwa.com/plan/contract2.pdf (pages 108-9)

B) SCHEDULE IRREGULARITY
1) WHEN A PASSENGER WILL BE DELAYED BECAUSE OF A SCHEDULE IRREGULARITY INVOLVING A NW FLIGHT, OR NW CANCELS THE PASSENGER’S RESERVATION PURSUANT TO RULE 135 (CANCELLATION OF RESERVATIONS), PARAGRAPHS A) OR D), THE FOLLOWING WILL APPLY:
A) WHERE NW CAUSES SUCH DELAY OR, IN THE CASE OF A MISCONNECTION WHERE NW WAS THE ORIGINAL RECEIVING CARRIER, NW WILL TRANSPORT THE PASSENGER WITHOUT STOPOVER ON ITS NEXT FLIGHT ON WHICH SPACE IS AVAILABLE IN THE SAME CLASS OF SERVICE AS THE PASSENGER’S ORIGINAL OUTBOUND FLIGHT AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO THE PASSENGER.
B) WHEN NW CAUSES SUCH DELAY OR, IN THE CASE OF A MISCONNECTION TO NW BY THE ORIGINAL RECEIVING CARRIER WHERE NW IS UNABLE TO PROVIDE ONWARD TRANSPORTATION ACCEPTABLE TO THE PASSENGER, NW WILL, WITH CONCURRENCE OF THE PASSENGER, ARRANGE FOR THE TRANSPORTATION ON ANOTHER CARRIER OR COMBINATION OF CARRIERS WITH WHICH NW HAS AGREEMENTS FOR SUCH TRANSPORTATION. THE PASSENGER WILL BE TRANSPORTED WITHOUT STOPOVER ON ITS/THEIR NEXT FLIGHT(S), IN THE SAME CLASS OF SERVICE AS THE PASSENGER’S ORIGINAL OUTBOUND FLIGHT AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO THE PASSENGER.
C) IF SPACE IS ONLY AVAILABLE ON A FLIGHT(S) OF A HIGHER CLASS OF SERVICE, SUCH FLIGHT(S) WILL BE USED, ONLINE AND WITH NO UNTICKETED STOPOVER PERMITTED, AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO THE PASSENGER.
D) IF SPACE IS ONLY AVAILABLE AND USED ON A NW FLIGHT(S) OF A LOWER CLASS OF SERVICE THAT IS ACCEPTABLE TO THE PASSENGER NW WILL PROVIDE A REFUND OF THE DIFFERENCE IN FARES PURSUANT TO RULE 260 (REFUNDS-INVOLUNTARY).
E) IF NW IS UNABLE TO ARRANGE ALTERNATE AIR TRANSPORTATION ACCEPTABLE TO THE PASSENGER, NW SHALL REFUND THE FLIGHT COUPON(S) FOR THE UNFLOWN PORTION(S) IN ACCORDANCE WITH RULE 260 (REFUNDS-INVOLUNTARY).
F) SCHEDULE IRREGULARITY DOES NOT INCLUDE FORCE MAJEURE EVENTS AS DEFINED IN PARA. G).

NW will transport you on their next flight, or, if not acceptable to the pax, on other carriers, or if that’s not acceptable, will refund the money. Also, you may end up with a free upgrade if that’s the only seat available.

The catch line in the CoC deals with the arrangements with other airlines. In general, the legacy airlines have extensive interline agreements, while F9, Southwest and the like tend to have none. Which means you are on a transportation “island”.

If anything is knee-jerk, it’s your willingness to trot out the word “moonbat” at anyone who hesitates at wholeheartedly adopting your violent, intolerant view of reality in which those who show mercy, forgiveness, compassion or concern for those less fortunate/lucky are simply insane.

Translated: I’m willing to trot out the word “moonbat” at anyone who thinks that the difference between murdering four innocent people in cold blood and not murdering anyone is a matter of fortune/luck. Which is true.

Your posts are consistently hateful, mean-spirited, bitter and most important, merciless.

This from the guy who comes perilously close to accusing all Republicans of racism, flat-out accuses me of supporting shady business practices, lectures me further about what I’m supposedly all about despite never having so much as met me, and idly speculates that everyone who doesn’t see things his way must be privately hoping for a chance to screw someone else over. Now, to top it all off, you have the gall to accuse me of being hateful, mean-spirited and bitter. That’s rich indeed.

Try and once look at someone like me, who sees the good in the (many, many) people you hate, as something other than a “moonbat” will ya?

I don’t hate people just because they are moonbats. I ridicule them because they are moonbats. There is a difference. As to seeing you as anything but a moonbat, all I can say is that I’m unable to “see” any part of you that you haven’t presented on this blog. Introducing yourself by calling a hardened murderer “harmless” and questioning the motives of those who were happy not to see the 1992 riots all over again was not a good start. Neither was attacking me for supposedly supporting corporations who screw individual customers, especially in a comment to a post in which I had just gotten done attacking a corporation for doing just that. So you’ll have to excuse me for only seeing the side of you which you’ve chosen to put on display.

Or at least that’s how you come off from my perspective. Your posts are consistently hateful, mean-spirited, bitter and most important, merciless. You’re definitely in top 1 percent of merciless writers I’ve read; it takes serious strain to see even the possibility that you might have compassion, somewhere in there.

The only thing I agree with you on at all is the possibility that there may be nothing better than the eat-what-you-kill killer-take-all economic system we have; but frankly, I can’t get excited about vigorously arguing day after day for THAT perspective. It can take care of itself very nicely, and has throughout history. Yet for some reason, that’s the side that gets you energized. No idea why.

So I’m going to take a break .. I need sleep tonight. Try and once look at someone like me, who sees the good in the (many, many) people you hate, as something other than a “moonbat” will ya?

So you think it’s better for you and Pat and various others who have already born the cost of your individual screwing, to pay an even higher cost, in the desperate hope that you might save others from getting screwed — all to protect the holy Shareholders and allow them to continue to see a tidy profit from screwing those who you fail to save.

If by “screw” you mean “do business, then yes, absolutely. The alternative, which you keep avoiding while carping about the evils of corporations, is to live in a Third World country where commerce as we know it cannot exist. If shareholders were held vicariously liable for the actions of the company, no one in his right mind would want to own a single share of any publicly traded company. If you think only bad companies get sued, and then only for “screwing” people, then you seriously need to get out more.

Oh, wait, I remember … “the entire economy would grind to a halt” if we let those who actually caused the harm pay for it.

No, moron, we already DO let those who cause a harm pay for it. What we don’t do, thank God, is hold shareholders vicariously liable for acts that they didn’t do, and given that their shares are now worthless, didn’t profit from, either.

I’ll tell you what I think the reasoning is: a dumb, unwavering loyalty to protect the right to screw another person and get away with it if you get a chance. Those who still hold fast to the hope that one day they might benefit from royally screwing someone else will support that right to the end — what keeps them going is the hope that one day they’ll be the screwer rather than the screwee. That’s the only explanation I can think of.

That’s because you don’t know the first thing about running a business, yet somehow feel qualified to hold a strong opinion on the issue anyway. Try actually running a business the way you claim all businesses are run, and you may well end up in prison. You’ll almost certainly end up with a bankrupt company, not a profit. In fact, to the extent you personally committed the acts that constituted screwing, you may find out that your “limited” liability wasn’t so damned limited after all. The only person it will protect is the person you managed to con into investing in your scam – and only to the extent that his losses will be limited to his bad investment. Of course you don’t care; for all your whining and moaning about businesses supposedly “screwing” customers simply by doing business with them, you don’t seem to care a hoot about innocent investors actually getting screwed by companies they had no control over.

Also, you never even bothered to address my point about the absurdly one-sided contracts we all are helpless to avoid entering into without becoming either effectively Amish, or full-time lawyers.

I’ve dealt with that issue before, though like everything else you pontificated about, it’s not as cut and dried as you make it out to be. In any event, it’s irrelevant to your idiotic idea that corporations should not be allowed to exist at all. It is funny, though, how quick you are to use the Amish as an example of how we’d all have to live to avoid adhesion contracts, even while advocating the end of all the corporations in the country who account for the difference between how the Amish live and how we do.

Finally … the word “moonbat” means “someone who won’t agree with me” right?

If it meant that I’d have to call just about every commenter a “moonbat,” which I don’t do. Seven people, including at least one liberal other than you, have commented on this thread. Only one has been called a “moonbat.” That’s not to say I’ve never used the term to describe anyone else – of course I have – but I defy you to produce a single example of someone I’ve called a “moonbat” who had not done or said anything extreme or knee-jerk enough to warrant it. Admittedly, I don’t have a coherent definition of “moonbat” at my fingertips, but like Potter Stewart and his ever elusive obscenity, moonbattery is something I know when I see it. And while there are close cases, you’re not one of them. If the term moonbat means anything at all, it has to include anyone who describes a multiple cold-blooded murder as “harmless” and advocates an anti-business law too radical for the most liberal state in the union (or for that matter, for France, Germany or any other remotely industrialized country in the world), without even trying to propose a workable alternative in its place.

What’s so important about making individual consumers bear the cost of bad business behaviour, instead of passing the cost on to those who BENEFIT from that bad behaviour, namely the shareholders? Oh, wait, I remember … “the entire economy would grind to a halt” if we let those who actually caused the harm pay for it. Whatever.

I’ll tell you what I think the reasoning is: a dumb, unwavering loyalty to protect the right to screw another person and get away with it if you get a chance. Those who still hold fast to the hope that one day they might benefit from royally screwing someone else will support that right to the end — what keeps them going is the hope that one day they’ll be the screwer rather than the screwee. That’s the only explanation I can think of.

Also, you never even bothered to address my point about the absurdly one-sided contracts we all are helpless to avoid entering into without becoming either effectively Amish, or full-time lawyers. Again, as far as I can tell, the only reason you can support letting others screw people this way is because you’re hoping against hope that one day you too will be able to screw people that way.

Finally … the word “moonbat” means “someone who won’t agree with me” right? As far as I can tell, among the incredibly broad range of people you apply the term to, that’s the only thing they all have in common. You use it so much it’s starting to sound like a tick.

When things go wrong, and you say “but wait, I’m getting screwed,” it’s too late. You agreed to the contract. They’re fully protected, and you’re naked, helpless, and forced to bear the entire loss caused by their bad behaviour. All you can do is say “damnit, I hope they screw enough other people that they eventually go out of business.”

Or you can do as Patterico and I did, and publicize their screwiness as widely as possible, so other people won’t have to get personally screwed by them to know better. After screwing Patterico, Valujet/AirTran lost any prospect of screwing me, CTG, and hundreds of others. Now, if they ever get an opportunity to screw you, you have no one but yourself to blame.

The only down side to relying on sunlight as disinfectant is getting occasional flames from moonbats who think I should be bashing all corporations solely for being corporations, rather than singling out the individual corporations that have done something to deserve it.

What a great system!

Like democracy, it’s a lousy system but it beats the alternatives. I’d rather deal with an occasional AirTran here and there than go back to the bad old days of ultra-regulated, butt-expensive air travel – though I’m sure corporate shills like you would be delighted by that, as regulated air travel was far less competitive, and therefore much more profitable, to the eeeeevil corporations. And your proposal – making individual shareholders vicariously liable for everything a large company does – would grind the entire economy to a halt. Sorry, I’ll stick with the current system, warts and all.

Let me give you an example of how hard it is to be an intelligent consumer these days: What percentage of the contracts to which you are a party have you actually read?

Start with your bank account and credit card contracts. Have you read them all? Do you know exactly what your obligations are, and just as importantly, what you’ve agreed to let your banks/credit cards do with your money and information?

These banks have hundreds of lawyers drafting these air-tight contracts for them. Have you ever, even once, had a lawyer review any of these contracts? If you haven’t you’re a chump. But if you have, you’re a chump, too, because the cost of having a lawyer pore through the contract for you at hundreds of dollars an hour is rediculously high.

This airline contract XLRQ is moaning about is another good example. Do you read the full contract you’re agreeing to when you buy a plane ticket? Buy a cell phone? Buy a peice of software?

Have you read your entire health insurance contract? Many are a hundred or more pages. If you don’t read them, you’re entering into binding agreements with a corporation that has tons of lawyers on their side trying to draft a contract that will serve them well and protect them completely from you: and you’re blissfully agreeing to it without having a clue of what it says.

Yet if you were to read all the contracts you enter into day by day, you’d have very little time left for anything else. Yet you are held, as a legal citizen of the U.S., to be an equal to a corporation with hundreds of lawyers.

When things go wrong, and you say “but wait, I’m getting screwed,” it’s too late. You agreed to the contract. They’re fully protected, and you’re naked, helpless, and forced to bear the entire loss caused by their bad behaviour. All you can do is say “damnit, I hope they screw enough other people that they eventually go out of business.”

What a great system!