So I called US Airways early last week to redeem an about-to-expire free ticket I’d earned by giving up my seat over Xmas in 2008. I booked a flight to Denver to go skiing with my brother and gave the woman on the phone all my information. Upon completion, she said she’d email me my confirmation. Well, I never got the email, so I decided to look up the flight online. Lo and behold, they misspelled my last name. Normally, in the pre-9/11 world, this would not have been a big deal, since you never had to show ID at the security screening points, but now, even a single letter aberration will at the least get me a full cavity search, if they even let me past security. So I called up US Airways to get the ticket changed, and was informed by the nice lady on the other end that the airlines are not able to change tickets. Evidently, the TSA has taken over that function, and any issued tickets are essentially fixed in stone. In fact, the TSA controls a good portion of the back office ticketing systems. And I thought republicans wanted smaller government and less intrusion!
