Dude turns terrible flight delay into best-selling book

Eight years ago Jonathan Miles had a travel horror story. He was flying between Memphis and New York via Chicago O'Hare on American Airlines. On his first leg, the plane circled O'Hare airport a few times but ended up landing in Peoria, Illinois with the airline blaming bad weather as the cause (Side note: "Bad weather" is airline code that they are not picking up your delay costs). After busing passengers 170 miles to Chicago ORD - where the weather turned out to be gorgeous - Jonathan then spent the night at the airport awaiting a flight out to New York.

Instead of drinking heavily in the airport bar, cursing the airline, cursing everyone who works at the airline and cursing everyone who has ever flown the airline (which is what I would have done), Jonathan got an idea that turned into a book he called "Dear American Airlines."

He recalls trying to sleep on the floor and starting a letter in his head, "Dear American Airlines."

It was fueled by "that outsized resentment you feel when you sense you're in the pinchers of some large corporation," he says. "It's like being put on hold for 45 minutes when you're trying to order a part to fix your coffee machine."

He never finished the letter. He decided, "I really didn't have that much in my life to complain about."

But he began to imagine a character who did: Benjamin Ford, an alcoholic, washed- up poet who's trying to rehab his life by attending the wedding of a daughter he hasn't seen in years.

Jonathan's novel - written in the form of a complaint letter to AA - was published last month and is currently ranked #351 on Amazon.com. The reviews are pretty fab. While I'm not personally a big fiction reader, I think I'm going to pick up a copy and give it a read.

Jonathan is currently traveling the US on a book tour to promote the book - and guess what? He's not flying American Airlines. Speaking of AA, the article has a great side note about how he could use the trademarked "American Airlines" in the title of his book - without their objection. So, what does the airline have to say about all of this? Word from their talking head:

"We understand it is a work of fiction, and we have no comment."

I wonder if they ever had a comment about the non-fiction event of why he was forced to land in Peoria when the weather was fine in Chicago and, more importantly, why he was bused from Peoria to Chicago? What did AA do with the airplane? Fly it empty back to Chicago? I'm suspecting - just suspectin' here - that the flight crew's work time was maxed out. So they bused the passengers to Chicago because the crew was over their union-mandated work allotment.

That would have pissed the living bejebus out of me and I would have gone certifiably p-o-s-t-a-l. I'm glad Jonathan used his frustration to create something good, that's inspiring!

So what about my airline experience book? I do have a working title: "Dear US Airways, your coffee tastes like feet"

I'm still working on the rest of it...

Bad airline experience inspires novel complaint letter [Arizona Republic]
Dear American Airlines [Amazon.com]