An Al Story™

The Knoxville Visitor's Bureau likes to boast that their beautiful city, the Gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains, is within a day's drive of half of the population of the U.S. That didn't give me any comfort during my weekly commute to Knoxville. It seems that you just can't get there from San Francisco.

OK, before you deluge my email with plane schedules that show that 12 airlines have over 120 daily flights into Knoxville allow me to provide some details, provisos and clarifications. Here goes....

In the spring and summer of 1996 I spent 6 months commuting from SFO to TYS (Knoxville's (actually Alcoa's) McGhee Tyson Airport). My normal schedule was to leave for Knoxville on the last possible connecting flight out on Sunday afternoon and return home on the last flight out on Thursday afternoon. The operative words here are summer and last.

An Al Travel Tip™ - Never connect with the last flight out of Chicago in the winter or the summer

Thunderstorms did me in. It could be a beautiful sunny day in Knoxville (and it usually is with a temperate climate and an average summer temperature of 76 degrees) and an equally beautiful day in Chicago, but your plane is very likely to be severely delayed. And in the summertime (not the Mungo Jerry song) there's a better chance than not that there's a thunderstorm somewhere in the central U.S. that will delay or cancel your flight.

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