Since mid-January I have been working on a project in Seattle. This has resulted in my becoming a road warrior again. I have not worked "on the road" to any significant degree since my consulting days in the 1990's with JMA, Texas Instruments and Sterling Software. Following that phase of my life, I moved to Dallas and started a more "rooted" job. Since 1997 a lot of things have changed, supposedly for the better. Or so I thought...
Here are some subjective personal observations about travel between Dallas and Seattle.

1. Airports
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Airports in the USA are still mostly structured as unfriendly, dislocatory conrete jungles. Most of the seating is hideously uncomfortable, and the cynic in me wonders if this is deliberate, so that people will feel obliged to walk around and, well, buy or eat stuff...
Road Warrior Issue #1 - the lack of power points for laptops. There are next to no power sockets in gate waiting areas in most airports, other than the power sockets used by the airlines' gate equipment (and most of those sockets are fully used). This results in a few road warriors all clustered around a single small collection of power points. Further adding to distress is the fact that a significant number of the power points do not work - at D/FW one day I found that 2 out of the 6 points at one gate area were dead.
Road Warrior Tip #1 - pack a multi-point adaptor. This will allow multiple people to use a power socket instead of 1, and you will be instantly popular with your fellow road warriors.
At Cincinnati airport this past weekend, I was pleased to see that Delta has recognized the issue and set up power point clusters near some of their gates. Other than that however, I have seen no evidence that airports or airlines are addressing the power point issue.
Road Warrior Issue #2 - variations in wi-fi coverage. Some airports have free wi-fi, some have charged wi-fi, some have no wi-fi at all. This is a further aggravation.

2. Security checks
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Despite the fact that they have had over 3 years to get used to it, a number of folk are still huffing, puffing and having mini hissy-fits over the security and baggage checks. There is only one phrase: Get Over It. Coming from Europe, where nobody is ever allowed to walk up to the gate area without a boarding pass, I do not find the security checks to be that awful. A minor nuisance perhaps, but the TSA folks are as nice and friendly as they can be. However, some passengers are not helping themselves by Doing Dumb Stuff. Like trying to carry their toiletries as carry-ons. That results in most of the bottled substances being left behind due to the new stringent liquid carry-on rules.

3. Airlines
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I have flown on a number of airlines since January. Here is my current league table, with comments:

#1 Frontier Airlines
I already posted about Frontier understands that flying should be fun. They have fun planes (the animals on the tail and winglets) and fun flight crews. The seating is good on the planes.

#2 Delta
Delta has well-fitted out planes with adequate legroom in coach, and they have good time-keeping. This past Sunday I arrived in Seattle 45 minutes early from Cincinnati. Delta also is addressing the road warrior power supply issue.
The only minus is that the flight crews mostly look like they would rather be undergoing a root canal than helping the passengers.

#3 American
American has no great points, but no really bad points either. Legroom in standard coach is not good, but the seats are reasonably supportive. The crews tend towards the Delta Airlines "I would rather have a root canal than do this job" approach, but perhaps this is the inevitable result of an industry with appalling labor relations based on mutual antipathy between leadership and front-line staff, where the leadership have been forcing the front-line folks to swallow job and salary cuts for years.

Last United
Where to start? Here are some of the issues:
legroom - unless you pay extra for Economy Plus, the legroom in coach is disgracefully non-existent. After 90 minutes you are moving around constantly to prevent cramping. This is also true on their Embraer executive jets, which have superficially nice leather seats, but those seats have no support whatsoever, which results in you sliding down in the seat very quickly. The cynic in me wonders whether the economy seating is configured to force all passengers to buy the upgrades, thus eliminating coach as we know it.
boarding - the gates are under-manned and the gate agents look harrassed and disorganized.
time-keeping - all of the flights I have travelled on were delayed, for reasons that were not immediately apparent. Bad weather delays I can understand, but not good weather delays.

4. Traveller Etiquette
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Many airline travellers would benefit from some sort of course in how to avoid becoming a human chicane during thir travel. Here are some of the egregious dumb-ass things that drive us road warriors nuts:

- Blocking aisles while getting seated
If you are in row 24 of a 33 row aircraft, you often do not need to stand in the aisle while unpacking the stuff you will be using on the flight. It is perfectly possible to stand in front of your seat and unpack, thus letting people past to the back of the plane. This simple action, if consistently done, could reduce boarding times by a massive amount.
- Fidgetting in your seat
Moving around constantly in a coach seat while in flight usually impinges on your next-seat neighbors and the person in front.
- Occupying no-mans land in the aisle after arrival
Once a plane arrives at the gate, many travllers will stand up to remove their overhead luggage. This would be ok, except that they then stand in front of their aisle east in a way that prevents the other passengers outside of them in the row from getting to the overhead bins. I recently tried to get past a woman who was doing this, only to be severely admonished for being rude. WTF? She was being obstructionist by standing in front of her seat, pointedly failing to notice that she was preventing me from getting to my hand baggage. (I did apologize to her, after swallowing hard, but she still failed to move and appeared to be determined to be a horse's ass).