text: It absolutely enrages me that, had our flight been cancelled (it wasn’t) due to the radar problem, we still would have been shuffled off into the weather-related arena with no compensation or hotel vouchers.
  Northwest seems pretty keen on opportunistically cancelling flights to save them money. Beware if your flight is scheduled during thunderstorms because you’re totally out of luck.
  Those DC-9s are loud as hell, too, and shaky feeling. I know that “with regular maintenance,” they’re 100% safe to fly in, but a) I doubt that maintenance is strictly kept up with and b) there’s just something off-putting about flying in an aircraft built in the early 70s.