AA vs US from Manchester Airport

We have just returned from our annual vacation to the USA flying, for the first time on US Airways, instead of our usual American Airlines. This is my impression and view on this trip.

Firstly we have flown AA from Heathrow to DFW direct in the past, and also done MAN-ORD-DFW as well, but we loathe changing from T5 to T3 at LHR as you have to clear security on entry to T3 despite just getting off an internal transfer flight. We fly based on price, and as DFW is AA's hub - they tend to have the best connections, certainly from Chicago where at peak hours the flights are 20 minutes apart.

So lets start with a review of this years flights. We booked US to fly MAN-PHL-DFW and return the same route. Firstly the price difference between US and AA was some £300 per person, so AA had to really pull out the stops - but they didn't. 

Flying out via LHR

Firstly AA had downgraded the lunchtime DFW flight to a 767-300 which is not a good plane, in AA's fleet. Other airlines have invested in the onboard product aboard the 767 but not AA, despite going through a fleet refresh at the moment (http://hub.aa.com/en/nr/media-kit/fleet/fleet-renewal). Even when the refresh is complete there is no AVOD on board in economy!! The pride of the fleet - the 77W, is only available on the early morning flight, which is tricky to get on to when flying from the provinces, so you either take the lunchtime or afternoon flight. We usually chose the lunchtime flight, which is either the 763 or sometimes the 772, which means you suffer from no IFE or very poor IFE.

Another problem with this is the horrendous queues at immigration - the wait times here can be 2+ hours which again is a pain after a 9-10 hour flight.

Flying out via ORD

Another alternative is flying Manchester to Chicago and then onwards, but again the 763 is the main aircraft used, and so the same problem as above - rubbish IFE! But at least the immigration queues at Chicago are better.

Lets try US Airways!

So, as they merged with AA we can now earn frequent flyer miles.They were considerably cheaper than AA and the times weren't that much worse than what we usually have, so we booked with them. The plane was roomy and IFE consisted of 9in screens with full AVOD and USB sockets in the armrests. This was very comfortable and the staff were friendly and helpful, particularly one of the stewards who gave us advice on transferring flights and some places in Dallas to visit. 

We then progressed to immigration and this was a breeze - passing though in about 20 minutes and then moved onto our next flight. We managed to buy some lunch to sort us out and took it on board. The biggest downer on the PHL-DFW flight was the lack of overhead bin storage, which meant we had to put our hand luggage into the hold. This meant a mad panic to remove items needed during the flight before sending the bags off into the hold. We have never had to do this on AA's ORD-DFW flight so not sure why this is the case on PHL-DFW.

Overall it was a pleasant experience and one I think we will try again.

My only hope is that US don't raise their prices to the level AA are at.

Summary

AA need to upgrade their fleet and make them more competitive in the market. The 763, whilst a good plane needs a proper onboard experience, and sadly doesn't live up to it. Also AA is putting the 757 on some flights to Manchester (As US are doing CLT-MAN) which is also not good. US have a good price and a good on board experience and so should get our business in the future.

Avoiding US Immigration at DFW is also a prime concern as it is unbelievable.

The Future?

The question is - will AA upgrade the MAN-ORD route by using a 787 when they arrive? Or introduce a 763 or 787 on MAN-DFW??? Both of these would be good moves IMHO...

Feel free to add comments...

Fedora 15/Gnome 3 First Analysis

So here's my first report about Gnome 3 and Fedora 15.


Pro's

• Loving Gnome 3 and the way it works
• Love the 'Activities' where the windows drop back to the desktop
• Loving when you just move your mouse to the top left corner, it saves you clicking activities
• Loving the hidden task list bottom left.
• Love the fact I can use my Windows Key (Am I allowed to call it that?) to bring up the menu.
• Its also very quick to use.

Con's

• Task Manager - I like some sort of clickable task list so I can quickly switch apps, like a taskbar or something similar?
• Workspace switcher. I currently work with the four panes in Gnome 2 and I like being able to quickly jump between workspaces. Its not as easy in Gnome 3 to do it.
• I can crash my Empathy chat window quite easily. When you type words they get highlighted as if they are spelt incorrectly. When you right click the word, the chat window closes and you get prompted to submit a report (which you can't). Why is this happening in stable software?
• Skype. Why oh why oh why when installing on a 64-bit do you have to do some manual messing and install i386 libraries - SORT IT OUT!!!
• Adding software is nowhere near as good as Ubuntu. Its complicated and not easy to find what you want. I am not saying it can't be done, just that its not as easy as Ubuntu Software center.
• Sometimes when doing graphic intensive stuff, the screen just goes completely white and unusable, so you have to reboot and start again. I thought this was my VM (VirtualBox 4.0.8) environment, but after a quick search, may not be the case.

I don't know whether to jump to F15 or wait for Ubuntu 11.10 which should include Gnome 3.

Decisions, decisions.....

Fedora 15

Just a note to say I am absolutely loving Gnome 3 on Fedora 15. I also like systemd but not sure about the 13 months support cycle. Although Ubuntu seems to have a 12 month cycle (except for LTS releases of course), not sure I can commit to Fedora 15.


Things I don't like, are the messing around to get Skype installed on a 64-bit system, and installing 64-bit Flash. Both of those are a pain - come on Fedora do better!!!

Ubuntu 11.04 - I've tried it!

Well I upgraded my netbook from Ubuntu 10.10 NE to 11.04 and the upgrade went quite smooth. I chose to the netbook first because it already had Unity installed and so shouldn't be that much different. It went ok, but took quite a long time to do. I expect this was because I did it so near the release date.


All went well and it works fine, so I decided to upgrade my laptop too. I left it upgrading but for some reason, the following morning it had all gone horribly wrong. So i decided to reformat and rebuild the whole laptop to 11.04. This I did and found straight away, the wireless doesn't work on my Dell Inspiron 6400. A quick trawl of the net to find - yes I was right - they don't work!! There was a link to some method of downloading and fudging some other drivers, but that's not why I chose Ubuntu. The reason I love Ubuntu is because it works and you never have to go near a command line to get things working. So to find that it doesn't work was a big disappointment. I then decided to rebuild back to 10.10 and that now works fine, so 10.10 its staying for now.


Also, Unity was getting a little difficult to understand and navigate, so I figured if I was having issues, then the rest of the family could also have these problems too, and I wouldn't be able to figure out the problem.


So, I downloaded VirtualBox for Windows and installed VBox on the main PC, to setup a VM to play with. Installed ok, but when logging in, I got the old style desktop. I then discovered that to get Unity running, you need to enable 3D acceleration before installing. I did this and the VM died. I tried to rebuild but it still wouldn't work. So its not quite working at the moment. I will try again tomorrow.


Watch this space.....

Linux Email Clients...and there is more

Yet another example of the world who think they know best!


Opera email client - I would like to control where my signature goes, but no they tell you how they think you should do it - link

..and i continue

I had another thought today (don't be shocked) to do with my Email client problem. I have my suspicions that the whole email client problem is holding back the deployment of Linux in the business environment.


Think for a while, we have Microsoft Office with 

• a word processor (Word)
• a spreadsheet app (Excel)
• a Database app (Access)
• a presentation app (Powerpoint)
• an email app (Outlook)

Now spot the one thats missing in Open/Libre Office? Yup, you guessed it - an email app. So if you wanted to switch to an alternative Office suite you have a problem. From my previous report, there is only one app - Outlook (in my opinion anyway).


So, I wanted to deploy Linux in an office environment what do I need

• The O/S - Sorted, Windows or Linux
• The Office Suite - Libre/Open Office (multi-platform) or MS Office (Windows Only)
• Browser - Firefox or Chrome, both platform independent
• Authentication method - AD works under both platforms (from my simple experiments)
• Email App - ah, the free suites don't have one, lets have a look. Hmm we really need Outlook, ok, we need MS Office, ok we need Windows.

And so Linux thereby gets omitted from the equation, because of one application problem. I am not going into the email app debate, as that was on yesterdays post.


My point? Sort the email app out and you might get a look in.

Linux Email Clients

I have recently been trying to find a replacement for Outlook under Linux, after all whats Linux got if it doesn't have a decent email client. My current client is Outlook 2010 64-bit and its good, very good. I love the way it works, the conversation view and the way it handles emails. But there must be another client as good, surely?

A bit of background info, we use Google Apps, and the Google Apps Sync App with Outlook and it works very well - more on this in a separate post.

Here is my evaluation

Evolution

On the surface, it looks and behaves as good as Outlook, and supports lots of functionality, but, and its a big but, it fails at the final hurdle. You setup your email account, and it supports POP or Outlook. If you tell it the account is a Google one, it also adds in Calendar and Contact synchronisation. So then it adds the account and begins downloading emails from your mailbox. OK, so far so good. Minor point here, but you can't remove the local folders if you use an IMAP service, but thats OK.

Next we go through the settings and select the 'always View HTML' options and setup the email signature to make it look nice. Then, I want to setup the default font and size for outgoing emails. This it seems you can specify and looks ok. But when you send a HTML format email, it strips out any font information, not only from the email, but also from your pre-formatted signature you setup in HTML. It seems the font specification is only for viewing emails, and not sending them. The actual font the email ends up in is the choice of the recipient software, with is usually times new roman.

OK, this is open source software, so there must be a fix? Well you would think so, but it appears not...

Here is the main bug report here which includes other references to the main issue. You can see the question was raised in 2009 and is still outstanding. The main issue here is I, and many others want to have nice looking emails, are ruled my company policies, and at least replicate functionality from the main competition (Outlook). If you trawl through this you will see various comments from the developers more or less indicating "thats the way it is - live with it".

How do you expect anyone to move away from Outlook with this attitude? How do you expect to penetrate the business world with this attitude? Or is it I am missing the point? Are they only after hobbyists who don't care what the emails look like and are happy with whats given? Its certainly holding me back.

Another issue is an Evolution/Google issue. When I delete an email, it removes the label from the email, which potentially lives lots of emails I don't want lying around and taking up space. I did try to tweak the Google IMAP options, but I believe this is something to do with the way Google deals with IMAP. Not quite found an answer to this one yet...

OK, and also the Google Calendar and Contact synch don't work and I can't find out how to change the settings so its not good either.

Thunderbird

When I found Evolution to not suit my requirements, I turned to Thunderbird as i have heard so many people like this. Well again, its not quite there. You can specify the outbound font, but not specify a size. You have the choice of small, medium, big, bigger and large. Not quite but i wanted, but getting there. The Google Calendar synch and contacts synch, were add-ons that i never got round to installing...

The problem here was the application kept crashing. It would download emails from my mailbox and then have an error and stop. Only a restart would correct it but I don't seem to understand how a widespread application like Thunderbird crashes???

The next issue it seemed to have a problem with my labels/folders. I have my folders underneath my inbox such as Inbox/Internal Emails and Inbox/Suppliers but when I tried to move an email in Thunderbird, it assumed it was INBOX/Suppliers - which didn't exist and so the move failed.

It looks like this issue has already been discussed here

So, it crashes and has problems with labels, and the composing font doesn't have many options.

Opera Mail

We move on now to Opera, which has an email client built in. I used v11 and found it to be a good fast browser (Until Chrome 9 came along, but thats another story...). After trying the other clients, I thought i would give it a go - I had nothing to lose!

You can setup an email account, and it has some specific instructions for setting up Google (here) and its not bad - you can view emails in HTML format, and its inside your browser - great!

Well again, the format of outbound emails fails again. When you reply to an email, it puts your response at the top, and appends your signature at the bottom. Thats not good? Can I have my signature with my reply please? No, and the forum entry went on to say, it should always appear at the bottom of the email, and not after the reply and Outlook is doing it wrong. So far this is not an option.

Microsoft Outlook

Well Outlook - what can I say? It works, and doesn't crash (like Thunderbird), It allows you to specify font particulars and other HTML functions, and then doesn't strip them when you click send (like Evolution). OK the signature placement is fixed, and Outlook possibly changed things to suit itself, but it works, its fast and it does what its supposed to - generates nice looking emails. You have to consider that rather than following anyones lead, it makes the rules up itself (or themselves - Microsoft) and some apps try to follow.

Conclusion

Well Outlook -its great, and there just isn't anything that comes close. Sorry, I would love to say the others are great too, but I can't. And the attitude of the developers of the other packages isn't helpful. Saying Outlook does things wrong and thats that, is not productive. Just make it a configurable option and let us decide - the end user.

What did I do to get round this? I use Ubuntu and created a Windows 7 VM running Outlook and GAS for email and other purposes. Come on Open Source movement sort yourselves out.

Feel free to add your own comments...