How to Spend Eight Hours Traveling a Few Hundred Feet

[jducoeur]

(I was reminded today that, while I've told this story many times, and a fair number of you have heard it, I don't recall ever writing it down. So...)

No shit, there I was -- on the tarmac in St. John's, Newfoundland.

The year was 1993, during the reign of Tsurunaga and Genevieve, and the Shire of Ar n-Eilean-ne had decided to hold an East Kingdom University.

Now, the thing about Ar n-Eilean-ne is that it is the northernmost point of the East Kingdom. And the easternmost point. Indeed, it is more or less the north-easternmost point of North America: St. John's is way out there. It's in the East Kingdom, but I believe it's technically closer to England than to Boston. It's a serious trip.

Of course, they invited everyone in the Kingdom to join them for University; of course, very few folks from the US actually came. In practice, IIRC, the American contingent wound up being four Carolingians and the King.

The event was delightful. My top (if by now rather vague) memories were discovering that five-year-old stockfish (from the autocrat's mother's larder) can make a truly fabulous dinner when the cook knows what they are doing, and His Majesty leading everybody on a small pub crawl afterwards.

So -- no shit, there I was the following morning, at the airport in my plane home. The flight up had been uneventful, and I fully expected the same to be true of the return. And that was true for the first half of the flight.

Down we flew, stopping at Yarmouth Airport (more or less the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia) for refueling, and thence on to Boston. All seemed to be going fine, and after a few hours we were approaching Logan Airport.

We began to circle for our descent. And circle. And circle.

After about half an hour of this, the pilot came on the PA, apologized for the delay, and announced that free drinks would be provided for all passengers. A small voice at the back of my head said, "Uh oh".

We continued to circle for a while, collectively partaking of the free spirits, and the passengers at the back began to get a little boisterous. I learned that they were a women's bowling team -- precisely why they had been visiting St. John's I don't know, but they greatly appreciated the booze.

Another half hour later, the pilot came on the PA again, terribly apologetic, and explained that we would be unable to land at Boston Logan. Boston was fogged in, and while that would normally not be a big deal (because instrument landing), the Tall Ships were currently in the harbor, and there was a non-zero chance of clipping a mast during the landing. We would be seeking other airports to land at.

Twenty minutes or so later, and the mood was getting a bit uglier. The pilot came back on the PA, and the ladies at the back began to vigorously heckle his French accent. He was terribly apologetic, but there was an additional problem -- none of the airports that were nearby and still open at this hour on a Sunday evening were international airports: they didn't have Customs, so we couldn't land at them. So we would have no choice but to fly back to Yarmouth.

An hour or two of backtracking later, the pilot came back on the PA, terribly apologetic, to explain that Yarmouth was now also fogged in. To this day I'm not quite sure why that mattered -- I halfway suspect that Yarmouth airport just didn't want to deal with us -- but we were going to have to keep going.

And so it was that, eight hours after boarding the plane, we landed -- at the next gate over from the one that we had originally taken off from. No worse the wear, but collectively cranky and tired as only a group of fifty strangers stuck in close quarters in an existential nightmare can be.

(Yes, the airline put us up for the night, and I got home the next day: bigger plane, clear skies, and as uneventful as I had originally expected. But it says something that that flight is my dominant memory of the trip.)

Comments

[cellio]

I hadn't heard that story before. Wow.

It's also a testament to how airlines have changed. Airlines don't take care of passengers like that any more, at least in my limited experience. They point to the contract of carriage and tell you all they actually owe you is a fraction of the ticket (that isn't enough to book a same-day one-way trip).

[lauradi7dw]

Just before the pandemic started, i was on a Jetblue flight (the last of the day) that taxied for a while before the pilot decided there was something wrong with a tire, and drove us back to the gate. Too late at night to have ground crew change it, no extra plane ready. They offered a motel voucher, which most took, but two of us asked to be booked on a 5 AM flight, and stay in the terminal. The gate agent had to arrange it with the security guards. They gave us a food voucher (less than $10), clearly not the same monetary value as the motel room, but more than nothing.

[cellio]

Interesting. The last time I flew before the pandemic -- also Jet Blue -- I had a very different experience. I had flown to Boston (from Pittsburgh) for a business trip. I booked the return trip for Thursday evening (rather than Friday mid-day) to avoid any possible complications with Shabbat. I did not book the last flight of the day, having previously learned that lesson. It was July -- no concerns about blizzards and the like.

My flight was delayed several times, until, five hours after the scheduled departure time, they cancelled the flight. This was a couple hours after they had already cancelled the later flight, so those people all left and got hotel rooms. It was now after midnight and we all queued up for rebooking. There were no rooms to be had, according to all our searches on our phones. (The passengers were all helping each other.)

When I got to the desk, the Jet Blue employee told me the next available flight was on Saturday morning. I said I couldn't fly on Shabbat and asked (nicely of course; it's not that person's fault) if there were any way to get me home on Friday before sundown. After several minutes of "not possible" / "what about this flight?" / "full" / "what about other airlines?" / "we don't do that", the person finally grudgingly put me on standby for the 5AM flight, warning me that it probably wouldn't work and I'd be looking at Sunday by then if it didn't. I was trapped, so I said yes, tried to sleep in an airport that actively hinders people sleeping in it, and thought about contingency plans for Shabbat in Boston (with no dress clothes). The only food still available (I'd arrived before dinnertime) was a Dunkin Donuts. We did not get any vouchers, though while we were waiting earlier they had brought us some bags of potato chips and pretzels.

(I overheard another couple making plans to rent a car and drive back and asked if I could come with them and I'd pay for the rental, since I wouldn't be able to contribute much to the driving. Unfortunately, they had decided to make lemonade by making some tourist stops along the way and they wouldn't get back for a few days. Retirement has its perks. I also checked buses and trains, but nothing could get me home in time. On a lark I even tried the Uber app, which rejected the destination.)

I got the last standby spot on that flight. There were 20 more people after me on the standby list.