Don't fly KLM/NWA.
I'm sitting at Boston's Logan airport's Terminal E, and have been sitting here for too many hours now: My flight back across the Atlantic, NW 38, is delayed by no less than five hours. At check-in (where they could not accept checked luggage for the moment, because the transport tape was broken), I was told that the flight would be delayed by one hour, and would be operated by a KLM 747 instead the scheduled NW DC-10. Boarding passess were issued for the 747, of course. At the scheduled time of departure, we were told that, unfortunately, they had no crew for that KLM 747 waiting at the gate. Now, nine out of ten crew members are allegedly here, and (breaking news) a DC-10 has landed.
By courtesy of NW's unfriendly and arrogant personnel (what's a five-hour delay for a six-hour flight, after all?), passengers were offered $10 in food vouchers as consolation for making an already-unpleasant red-eye even worse. Non-McDonalds dinner around here costs $20.
Later, from Schiphol: NW 38 arrived in Amsterdam 6 hours late. KLM distributed 10¤ food vouchers and a 50¤ voucher to be used for future KLM flights (as if). They weren't even willing to exchange that voucher for lounge access, which is worth 45¤. "Lounges are not intended for service recovery." The story behind the delay appears to be that the originally-planned DC-10 (the last of these machines were built in 1989) had maintenance problems in Amsterdam, and was replaced by the KLM 747 we saw. Unfortunately, nobody paid attention to the need for a crew that was able to operate the machine on the way back from Boston. So they brought another DC-10 from Memphis, and that's the machine in which I spent last night.
