Easy enough trip to Miami, no major snowstorm like we had to deal with last year. Got into Miami about 20 minutes late, then ended up spending at least a good 45 minutes or an hour while Princess waited for another group to come in and get luggage before they took us to the hotel. Seemed a little excessive in our book, especially considering that for this mandatory operational “overnight” we knew we were going to be going to the airport for a 12:50 am flight. Got to the hotel around 7pm, and after figuring out how to check in (Princess did not do a great job with this), found out we were assigned the 9:40pm bus to the airport. So our mandatory overnight turned out to be less than 3 hours. Ended up eating dinner there at the hotel since we hadn’t seen anything coming in, and didn’t really have a lot of time to go out exploring. Went down to catch the bus, and once again Princess seemed to be lacking, with nobody anywhere to give you any directions on where to go. All together, not exactly the most favorable impression so far. Get to the airport to check in, and find the amusement contined. Our charter flight was on Omni Air International, and they were using the Virgin Atlantic booths to check in. But apparently, they’re only sorta allowed to use those booths, because they couldn’t run the luggage through the system, and instead were putting them on carts to haul off to TSA for inspection, jockeying around people with luggage trying to check in. The F terminal at the Miami aiport is also a joke. I honestly don’t know how they can even legally operate it with a normal flight load during the day. As far as we could determine, there’s one restroom each for the men and women, and the men’s at least had 4 stalls. With just our flight with 350+ people it was still inadequate.
Things really became a joke when we got on the charter. It was a DC-10 airplane, and was confugured in a 3-4-3 seating configuration. I honestly don’t know what normal was for a DC-10, but I can’t imagine it was that. For one thing, you could barely walk down the aisle. Lucky us got a bulkhead seat. What that meant was probably a smidgen more leg room (and nobody to recline into you), but seats with immoveable arm rests, and I’d probably have to guess it was maybe a 16 inch wide seat. I’ve never seen a seat that small in an airplane, even commuter jets. Bulkhead of course means no underseat storage, but to top things off, the first couple of rows in the section also didn’t have any overhead storage. And what overhead storage there was, nobody bothered to warn anyone that it wasn’t exactly designed for a standard carryon piece. Could be worse, we know of a couple that was assigned row 13. Problem was there wasn’t actually a row 13 on the plane. They did serve a breakfast on the plane. Somewhere around 3 am or so, and after making an exceptionally loud announcement that they were doing so (naturally, right after I had finally managed to actually fall asleep). This was by far the worst flight I’ve ever been on, and to be honest, I’d argue the seating configuration at a minimum borders on the inhumane. Oh, and what do they frequently use this plane for? Shuttling troops overseas. That’s just plain not right. (FWIW, the one flight attendant told the couple near us what the seating capacity on the plane was, and I’m pretty sure they said 378.)