Before you fly on Southwest Airlines — particularly on a multi-leg journey — consider the experience I outline in this letter to the airline:

Aug. 13, 2007

Dear Sir or Madam:

Let me preface this letter by saying this is not one of those throw-a-fit-and-seek-compensation screeds that you probably get regularly. I don’t want any compensation of any kind and wish for that to be quite clear up front. Let me also say that I am a veteran flier who is completely familiar with the brew of problems triggered by the combination of the nation’s aging flight control system and afternoon summer thunderstorms, such as those that popped up the afternoon of Aug. 9 in the eastern half of the country.

What I cannot accept is what happened to me and perhaps 20 to 30 other passengers on Southwest Flight 2280 out of BWI on Aug. 9. It led to a situation in Cleveland that was so ugly that police had to be called, and it destroyed my trust in your airline. It is also no way to do business.

Here is what happened: This flight was delayed perhaps three hours out of BWI (two hours at the gate, one more at the tarmac) because of a series of cascading events. Primary among these, of course, were the series of ground stops the FAA ordered as thunderstorms rumbled across the eastern half of the country. These stops delayed the arrival into BWI of the plane that was to be used for this flight, as well as the pilots (who were coming in from one city) and the flight attendants (who were coming in from another).

I understand all of that, although the three scattered locations of the plane, pilots and flight attendants made me raise my eyebrow a bit.

Anyway, after the delay, the plane took off for Cleveland. This flight was supposed to continue on to Las Vegas (my final destination) and then to LAX. However, to the soon-to-be-surprise of those of us on the plane, this was not to be the case.

We arrived in Cleveland and the passengers who had reached their final destination disembarked. Next, a ground crew member came on the plane, told us there was going to be an “equipment change” and ordered everyone to get off. I assumed that some sort of mechanical problem had occurred.

Equipment change, my foot: Southwest had decided to re-route our plane to Orlando for a different flight. And it had sent the Cleveland-to-Vegas-to-LAX part of our flight out of Cleveland on a DIFFERENT plane some two hours earlier, before we even left Baltimore — even though this flight allegedly originated with us! We didn’t know about this…yet.

So, about 20 to 30 of us yanked our gear out of the aircraft, walked out of the jetway and were greeted by…no one. There was no one to explain to us what had happened, no one to tell us what to do next, no Southwest staff at all other than a couple of gate agents who were up to their eyeballs in dealing with outgoing Orlando passengers.

You can imagine the anger of our group upon being greeted with this scenario. We had just been thrown off our plane, stranded in Cleveland, and had no idea what was going on. The Southwest staff seemed as surprised as us to find us there.

Finally, a supervisory type arrived on the scene, came over to us and told us that there had been an announcement in Baltimore that our flight would terminate in Cleveland. That is utterly false and generated a roar of fury from the passengers on our flight.

None of us received any warning of any kind. All of us who were headed for Vegas or LAX thought that our flight would continue on — who ever heard of canceling a flight in mid-trip, stealing the plane, changing the flight number for the plane and sending it elsewhere? Facing a cancelation like this, why would we choose to fly to Cleveland, which has comparatively few Southwest flights, instead of staying in BWI where there would be many more options?

The supervisor also told us that the Cleveland-to-LAS leg of the flight had left some two hours earlier. That came as an additional utter shock to all of us. How did our single flight number, which originated in Baltimore, get magically split up this way? How was that even possible?

At this point, things got so ugly at the gate that police had to be called. We were furious, Southwest’s staff was extremely harried and were angry right back, and all meaningful communications broke down. We literally were shouting at each other.

But your airline wasn’t finished with us for the night. Next, we were told that we would have to pay for our own hotel rooms for the night because this termination had been caused by the weather. Again, this is false. This flight could and should have continued on; there was no weather-related reason for this outcome. Southwest thus effectively threw us off our plane and then wanted us to pay extra for the privilege of being stranded in Cleveland overnight.

The fury of the stranded passengers at this point is hard to describe, even with the police already there.

After this round of passenger rage, the person in charge wisely changed her position on hotels, and the people at the gate began dealing with the problem of getting people onto other flights the next day (a challenge in itself). I got put on a Friday morning flight to Vegas — I was lucky, because we were warned there weren’t going to be enough seats to accommodate everyone who wanted to travel from CLE to LAS the next day.

From your end, I can guess what happened here: You sent another plane out of Cleveland to Vegas and LAX before we got to Cleveland — even though our flight was the one that was supposed to continue — because you had to reposition crew and equipment. The crew either needed to travel elsewhere that night after LAS or you had to make sure that they got the FAA-mandated number of hours of down time at their final destination.

But here is my position as a customer: You cannot responsibly act this way. You cannot take a flight that has a single flight number, yank off the passengers at a stopover city and steal the plane for a different flight.  You certainly cannot dump passengers at a gate in a stopover city to be met by a hopelessly overworked staff who have no idea why those passengers are there. You absolutely cannot do this without warning your customers in advance that this would happen.

Companies who act in this manner have broken a fundamental trust with their customers — and certainly, I no longer trust you. And this delicate chess game you are trying to play with staff, equipment and weather is getting out of hand.

If you look at the origination of this flight, you had to assemble a plane from one location, pilots from a second location and fight attendants from yet a third location — on a summer afternoon in thunderstorm season. That’s a recipe for disaster.

You then shuffled off equipment and crews from Cleveland to keep the chess game moving forward, assuring us that we would be stranded. You kept us misinformed in Baltimore and certainly misled us, if not flat-out lied to us, repeatedly upon arrival in Cleveland. You then initially tried to force us to reach into our own pockets to pay for hotels that we needed because of this cascade of falsehoods. That’s quite a lot of system-gaming in just a little bit of time.

I’m not going to make the usual threat to never use your airline again. Frankly, I’m almost certain to have to use Southwest again. Your airline is too pervasive in this market to avoid — you offer me the best options to get me where I want to go. And again, I am familiar with weather-related travel problems — if you had canceled the flight in BWI or told us in Baltimore what would happen in Cleveland, I would have been fine. Weather delays are always the risk you face in traveling.

But it hopefully won’t take too many stunts like this before your bottom line starts being affected. If that happens, you will have richly deserved it. If you don’t care about your passengers, your honesty or your reputation, perhaps you’ll at least care about your profits.