Travel Nightmares R Us

The final line of the previous post was “What are the odds of getting home safely at the end of the week without more snow? Let's not bet on it.” Boy howdy, was I prescient. When the nasty storms are swirling about and you hear on the news “thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled today, due to the 43 feet of snow that fell on metro Whoville”, it’s hard to understand how that affects the travelers to and from Whoville, plus those who are just connecting through Whoville on their way to the North and South Poles. Lucky for you, I happen now to have a freshly baked story of what happened to me when I attempted to fly home to Whoville a few days ago after two long, intense weeks away from my Cindy Lou Who and the whole Who family.

I left my client in Chicago a little after noon on Thursday. I had a confirmed seat on American Airlines’ 7:30pm flight to Boston, but since I was done early with my training, I decided to head to O’Hare to get myself on an earlier flight. American told me that I could get on the standby list for the 4:30 flight, and I stood at least a fighting chance of making it. So that’s what I did. When I got to O’Hare, I checked in, and put myself on standby for the 4:30. At the outset, I was #8 on the standby list, but of course that would change. I knew that Boston was due to get 1-3 inches of snow, but P told me on my to O’Hare that we already had a good six inches of new snow on the ground, and it didn’t look like it was stopping soon. That was bad sign #1.

Not long after I got to the airport, the 4:30 flight was pushed back to 6:15, and the board showed the troubling word “NO” where the departure gate should be. That’s never a good sign. So I was looking at an indeterminate wait time. I checked into the American Airlines Admiral’s Club on a 1-day pass, so I could remain productive and comfortable while I was wondering if I should consider an O’Hare-area hotel for the night. Emails and calls with client and company staff, plus calls with P and my folks kept my spirits up for few hours. The staff at the Admiral’s Club weren’t optimistic, though. “The time has backed up to 7:45, and you’re now #22 on the list for your standby flight. Feel free to go to the gate and see if you get on, but don’t get your hopes up. You’re not going to make it”. In the meantime, the departure time for the flight I was ticketed for was backing up, too. The snow hadn’t completely stopped at Logan. It was just pausing off and on. So I went to the gate and waited. Amazingly, as I was resigning myself to going to the next flight’s gate, I got the next to last available seat. I happily settled in, feeling lucky. By now, I’d already been at O’Hare for about 7 hours, but the weird part hadn’t even yet started.

As we pulled away from the gate at around 8pm Central time (9pm Eastern), the pilot got on the PA and greeted us for the first of what would be dozens of times over the next number of hours with his first piece of bad news. Because of traffic flow problems out of Boston as a result of the snow, we were not going anywhere for another 50 minutes. We were already delayed from the getgo. This was delay #2. We ended up leaving only about a half hour later, and “saved” 20 minutes. We hoped the worst was over. Silly us. Kafka had boarded the flight, but we didn’t know it yet.

The flight was late, but reasonably uneventful until we got closer to Boston, and it started feeling like when we should have been descending, we were doing a lot of circling. That was because when we were supposed to be descending, we were doing a lot of circling. The pilot informed us that Boston traffic control needed us to wait awhile longer, since the ONE functional runway was repeatedly being closed down to plow the snow that was still falling in Boston. Remember the words “snowplow” and “runway”. We’ll return to them. At the time, the most pressing problem wasn’t actually the snowplow, but the pesky reality that we were running low on fuel, and we couldn’t wait as long as Logan wanted us to. So (this is where I expected him to say we were landing right away), we were instead going to land at Bradley Airport, outside Hartford, to get refueled. Oy. When that was done, the pilot said, we’d be able to fly directly to Logan and reach our destination. It sounded like a rather nice promise at the time. At 11:15pm, we landed at Bradley. I called P and said “Hi sweetie. The good news is we just landed. The bad news is we’ve landed in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.”. She laughed entirely too loudly and too long at that one. She said the American Airlines website was promising we’d be at Logan just after midnight. I knew that was, as P and I like to say, “NBL”, or Not Bloody Likely. Theoretically, we should have been able to get refueled, de-iced and back on our way within a half hour.

This was not a night for theory. We sat in the middle of the tarmac. And sat. Around midnight, the pilot came on again, sounding as exasperated by now as we all felt. It seems that after hours, Bradley has a grand total of one person who’s responsible for refueling, and he must have been busy doing something else, because he wasn’t on his way yet. It took sometime longer for us to finally get gassed up and de-iced. Almost two hours after touching down in Hartford, we were once again going to be on our way to Logan. It should be, the pilot assured us, a “19 minute flight”.

This was already a strange day, but suddenly Kafka made an appearance. We hadn’t left the plane. In fact, most of us, me included, hadn’t left our seats, as there was nowhere to go. Still, there must be some FAA requirement that a commercial plane is prohibited from taking off before the flight attendants go through the obligatory safety lecture, reminding you how to use a seat belt, and that smoking in the lavatory is a federal offense. We’d heard this spiel once already, hours ago at O’Hare. Just in case we had forgotten, though, they bored us one more time with things we already knew and didn’t care to hear again at this annoyingly late hour.

So at 1:05am, we took off. Some time later, the gentleman sitting next to me, a thoroughly delightful guy, complained that “this is the longest 19 minutes of my life”. “That’s because it’s already been more than a half hour”, I replied. At that point, it was time, once again, to hear from our old buddy, the captain. Kafka was by this time sitting in the co-pilot seat.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you’ll notice we haven’t landed yet”. (No shit, Sherlock. We’d gathered that.) “It seems that luck is not on our side tonight.” (Ya THINK?) “The reason we haven’t landed is that a snowplow has gotten stuck at the end of the runway that we need at Logan, and they’ve shut down the runway temporarily to get the snowplow removed, so everyone’s in a holding pattern up here, until they get that out of the way”. (Uh huh. How much gas do we have?)

A few minutes later, it got curiouser and curiouser. Now, he explained that a SECOND snowplow had gotten stuck, and we had to wait for that one to get cleared. By this time I had determined he was just making up stuff as it hit him, and maybe he had lost track of where Logan was located. Perhaps we were actually circling Gander, Newfoundland, and he didn’t have the heart to tell us he was lost and didn’t know how to ask for directions.

Finally, he said that we could land, but it would be on a different runway, and our runway of destination “still had a bit of snow on it”, so that he was going to use the plane’s power brakes to “make sure we stopped, and stayed on the runway”, and as a result the landing might be “a little more abrupt” than we’d otherwise expect. The guy in the next seat gave voice to my ensuing thought “Is that a kind way of saying that we should put our heads between our legs and kiss our ass goodbye?”. However, our pilot, Kafka, assured us that we “had nothing whatsoever to worry about”. At this point, it’s two in the freakin’ morning, dude. I could have left my client site in Chicago at noon and driven home and I would have been closer than I was at that moment.

Amazingly, we actually did land at 2:15 am Boston time. I’ve had many, many worse landings. I’ve only had a handful of flights where the passengers broke into spontaneous applause, and this was the first one where I joined in. While I wasn’t technically home yet, at least I was finally back in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and on solid ground again. Of course, by solid ground, I mean Logan Airport, still holding the rank of damn near the worst major airport in the US. Baggage took 40 minutes to arrive, and as is Logan’s wont, was delivered on the wrong carousel, without any announcement cluing passengers in to that little glitch.

My car pulled up to my house in Maynard at 3:45 am Friday, a little over 14 hours since I had left the south side of Chicago. In another 3 hours, I’d need to be awake to get to the office for a morning meeting.

Yes indeed, I love travel. Happy holidays, and for those of you who don’t have to fly anywhere this winter, count your many blessings. I’m due back in Chicago on Sunday, January 6.