A Small Step into the Air Travel Big Leagues

As I write this, I am sitting in the living room of a condo in The Grand Lodge by Deer Valley Resort in Park City, Utah. The living room has a two-story vaulted ceiling with 12-inch hand-hewn wood beams and a multitude of 6-foot tall windows looking out at the mountain – and the base of the Northside Express ski lift which is about 30 yards away. 

As I watch empty quad-chairs descend the mountain, slow down, make a half-circle, load up with skiers, and begin the ascent back up the mountain, I’m impressed by this little feat of engineering. How does the chair — which is attached to the thick metal cable and moving at a pretty good pace as it arrives at the loading area — suddenly slow down enough so people can safely and easily line up in time to sit down before it speeds back up to take the skiers up the mountain?

It turns out that the chairs on what are known as “high-speed lifts” detach from the cable when they get to a loading/unloading area. Older traditional ski lifts were “fixed-grip lifts,” meaning the chair was permanently attached to the cable. Except this meant that the lift could only run at a speed that would allow people to safely get on and off, so a trip to the top of the mountain was slow going. Much faster than walking, but ski area operators wanted to get more people up their mountains faster and reduce lines at the lifts, and the technology for high-speed lifts was born. 

Photo by John Hook.

Of course, now that I know the chair is detaching from the cable every time people get on and off, I’m a little queasy about the process. Even though I understand the balance of the chair is such that it would still hang on to the cable even if it weren’t attached, maybe this was one of those things I was better off not knowing.

However, the technology I’m really interested in today is the one that allowed me to get to Park City from State College without a multi-day car, bus or train ride. That technology would, of course, be flying.

Planes allow us to travel this 2,000-mile distance in a matter of hours. I can stay here for a few days, just long enough to get myself acclimated to the time zone change, then turn around, go home to Happy Valley, and stay up until 2 a.m. for a few days while I get re-acclimated to the eastern time zone. Whew. I have a few friends who travel from coast-to-coast on an irregular basis and I do not know how they handle those time changes.

Excitingly, within the last few months in Happy Valley we have seen the inauguration of a new flying option that makes us locals feel like we’re moving into the air-travel big leagues. For many years we’ve sufficed with commuter-service to Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit and, in the last few years, Chicago. Which is great if one of those is your final destination. But anywhere else and you need to engage in the dreaded transfer of planes with sometimes frustrating results.  

However, we now have two new direct-flight options – we can fly to either Orlando or Tampa! Allegiant Airlines recently started service to those two cities from our getting bigger-by-the-minute airport. Although the first thing to be aware of is they don’t fly into the primary airport in either Orlando or Tampa.

For Orlando, they fly into what is now known as Sanford-Orlando International Airport, which is a little more than 30 miles directly north of the main Orlando International Airport. Having flown to the Bahamas years ago in a chartered DC-3 taildragger – you enter the plane at the rear and walk uphill to your very rudimentary seat – out of what was then a very backwater Sanford Airport which had no commercial plane service, I can tell you Sanford-Orlando International Airport has grown up quite a bit.  

In Tampa, they fly into St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport, which is about 15 miles directly southwest across Tampa Bay – the real “bay”, a big body of water, not the Buccaneers – from Tampa International Airport.

In both cases you get into the metro area you want without having to deal with multitudes of other airlines passengers because Allegiant is the primary or only airline with commercial service at each airport. Our family experience at Orlando-Sanford Airport – having flown Allegiant there from Harrisburg, Hagerstown, and now State College – is this makes your travel a less bustling and less nerve-racking time. It also makes it a bit easier if physically navigating large terminals and long concourses is difficult for you, something members of our extended family have done with crutches, canes, walkers and wheelchairs.

Another exciting aspect of this new service is the arrival to our hamlet of full-size airline “equipment,” as the airline folks refer to their airplanes. Our commuter-oriented airline service has always used commuter-sized planes or jets. They rise only a few feet off the ground, you duck as you enter — and often as you walk/crawl down the aisle — and you only have one or two seats on either side of the aisle. 

Allegiant has arrived with full-size Airbus jets that require walking a tall ramp to get into the plane – no ducking necessary as you enter the plane and walk down the aisle – and three seats on both sides of that aisle! Until this turn-of-events the only time full-size jets were seen on the tarmac at University Park Airport were for college sports teams coming and going. It’s an exciting sight to see an A-319 pull up to the terminal at State College for us regular paying customers.

However, one item we locals now need to note is that parking at the airport is priced at $12 a day – which means it’s the same price as the second-most expensive parking option at BWI (Baltimore-Washington Airport). So if you’re gone for a week in the sunshine of Florida the parking bill will set you back $84. Until a lower-cost long-term option becomes available you may find a taxi or rideshare will save you some money, so plan in advance. 

That small issue aside we’re grateful and excited for this new air service, and very happy to get on a plane right here in Happy Valley and walk off right into the warmth and sunshine of Florida. It gives you a nice big-time airport feeling.