Waiting two hours for a delayed flight is bad enough. Add a faulty flight information system and poor airport customer service, and you 're ready to start looking around for an Amtrak schedule.
When Ann McNeary arrived at the Dane County Regional Airport at about 10 a.m. March 11 for her 11:40 a.m. flight to Cleveland, she expected she 'd be cooling her heels for about an hour and 47 minutes.
She based that assumption -- wrongly, as it turned out -- on the airport 's departure monitors, which showed her flight delayed by seven minutes.
More than three hours later, McNeary had a different view of monitors ' reliability.
"I 'm looking at numbers that mean nothing, " she said. "Once we were past 11:40, it just went away. "
McNeary said an airline representative told her that the times on the monitors are not always accurate and that her flight was much later than seven minutes.
Irritated, McNeary filed a complaint with the airport that day, but said she never heard anything back.
Late last month, she filed a second complaint -- with SOS.
Sharyn Wisniewski, the airport 's marketing and communications manager, said McNeary 's experience with the monitors, known as the Flight Information Display System, was a rare one.
Instead of relying on airline employees at the airport to update the flight information, the airport contracts with a company that provides flight departure and arrival information directly from the airlines ' dispatch offices, she said.
"We have a system that links up with the very best data available, " she said. "Does it mean that the technology works every single day? No. Sometimes there are blips. "
Those blips were probably more frequent in February and March when the airport upgraded software used in tracking and displaying flight arrivals and departures.
She said in a statement that the company that provides the flight data, Official Airline Guide, claims its information is "98 percent " accurate.
Wisniewski said she did make an earlier attempt to contact McNeary about her complaint, although McNeary wasn 't aware of one. The two did connect last week, and McNeary said she was satisfied with the explanation, even if her experience March 11 left her with some misgivings about the airport.
And she 's still baffled by what seemed like a complete lack of recycling bins in about half the airport 's gate area.
McNeary said that during her hours-long wait that day in the airport, she looked for but could not find bins for newspapers and recyclable containers -- an absence she thought odd for an eco-friendly town like Madison.
There are recycling bins at the airport -- 12 to be exact -- and eight of them are multireceptacle bins for paper, glass, cans and plastic, Wisniewski said.
"I really, really didn 't " see any of the bins, McNeary said.
Two of the bins in the part of the airport McNeary waited in are shaped like traditional garbage cans, however, leading McNeary to speculate, "I recycled by accident? "
Send us an SOS! Is something wrong in your neighborhood, your city or Wisconsin? Send an SOS: crickert@madison.com, 608-252-6198, or P.O. Box 8058, Madison, WI 53708.
