I waited 20 hours to get from Fort Lauderdale to D.C. I was blessed to have found an engineer from NPR's WAMU who was in constant touch with forecasts and delays. The little indie airlines were so tossed about by the weather; the engineer and I ended up on a USAirways flight where lines were long, but answers (and flights) were given. JetBlue was certainly an extreme, but what kept the smaller airlines in general from functioning intelligently?