I never thought it would happen to me.
(Nah, it's not one of those stories!)
The 2 hour weather delay was irritating. But the 5.5 hours stuck inside a plane, 3.5 hours of it 5 feet from the gate, but not at the gate, making a retreat back into New York City impossible... that's what got me.
The 8:30 pm edt flight landed in Los Angeles at 6:20am pdt... almost 13 hours later.
I could have gone to China.
But the undiscussed horror of travel nightmares like this is not just the hours stuck - we had no overflowing toilets and most of the passengers slept through much of it - but recovering from the experience.
What really struck me was that American Airlines knew that the delay, once we were sealed into the plane, would be at least 2 hours because of the long back-up of planes trying to leave JFK. And instead of informing the passengers, it pretended everything was normal. This was before they decided they needed to refuel the plane after we sat near-but-not-at the gate for the first 90 minutes.
I knew trouble was brewing, but I didn't want to be "the troublemaker," which was an issue added to getting out fo a plane at 2:30 am at a near deserted JFK with the goal of, what, hoping to find transportation back into the city to pay some ridiculous amount for a hotel room for 8 or 9 hours before starting the whole process again.
One thing I did on the plane was read Sway, a book about the inclinations we all show in our human interactions. One of the stories was of a KLM pilot who killed a plane full of people trying to stay on schedule and not pay for passengers to have an overnight stay… and he had been head of safety for the airline.
I knew that American had instituted a 4-hours-in-the-plane-waiting maximum last year. I looked it up on my iPhone while sitting there in Hour 3. But incrementally, and with my meek assistance (which still felt like me being mean as I challenged the crew to come up with answers), we went from an obvious 2.5 hours to 3.5 hours to 4.5 hours to 5.5 hours.
And we all survived. And I don’t have an illness from it. And the babies were quiet.
But the way we try to cover over the absurdity of the situation… that the airline didn’t do the right thing or offer fair warning… that they got lucky to be at late fight with sleepy people, as there would have been a rebellion if this all happened at midday… that we were less than 30 minutes from the pilot being disallowed from flying the plane for fear of his exhaustion and that a slightly greater delay would have had us all at the gate anyway after all of that… that scores of people in L.A. were inconvenienced significantly by a flight that was due before Midnight arriving just after 6am…
We walk away just happy it’s over… knowing it is also uncomfortable for the employees administering the situation… knowing that “acting out” would make fellow passengers uncomfortable as well (or free them of their fear of being “trouble makers”)… getting horrible service for our money… with no real recourse… with no real thanks or remuneration… when the weather was only the start of the problems and the airline acted badly…
As soon as I knew the plane would be delayed more than 4 hours, into the night, the only question I should have been asking myself was whether a good night’s sleep for me and the person waiting for me in L.A. was worth the financial and scheduling cost of changing flights TO ME, not to American Airlines. Instead, there was all this other stuff, while exhausted… while hungry… without services easily obtained…
I don’t want to linger in it… but I want to think about it… a lot. Because it is more than a delayed flight or 13 hours of my life or a listless Sunday caused by the limits of my endurance. These are the balances of daily living, writ large, if only for a half day.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2008/06/long_nights_jou.html