Uncle Sam is a rotten co-pilot

Nobody enjoys sitting through other people's airline horror stories, so I'll just give a précis: I'm on a trip in Europe, and in the course of three days, Air France managed to strand me in both Paris and Tunis. I was thousands of miles from home with no way to get back. First it negated my reservation in the middle of a layover and next it completely lost a second set of reservations. The only way to solve both disasters was to throw money at the problem.

The extraordinary incompetence of Air France could fill a book, but I'm sure you have your own miserable story about your own airline of shame (United could fill a second book, if I thought its executives cared about reading it).