What am I doing HERE?

23 September 06

How did I end up getting stuck here in the Oklahoma City Airport? I feel like this whole thing is not even real any more.

I got on a bus in Copenhagen yesterday at 7 in the morning, because, after all, you need several hours to get on an international flight. Like from 8 to 3:30. Seriously.

Except for multiple catterwalling babies, whose parents I felt deeply sorry for until the flight, and the crying, went into extra innings somewhere over Greenland. Then I remembered one incident where Brendan couldn’t stop crying on a flight when he was about a year and a half old. The problem was that Holly had eaten Szechwan for lunch. I started thinking bad thoughts about this group of parents. By then we were in USA air space, where a big surprise awaited us, in the form of a map running on the in-flight “entertainment” system, which clearly showed that we were executing a square maneuver over Lake Michigan, just a few miles from O’Hare Airport. At first we laughed about it, thinking it was some glitch in the GPS system manifesting itself. As it dragged on, I looked out and noted that we were making 12 degree banks, the easy way to travel in square patterns.

Additionally the asses were sore from nine hours of sphincter-numbing, the baby crying situation, and so on. So the captain gets on and tells us, in Danish first, that we're being diverted to Milwaukee until we can get cleared into O'Hare, and here's the kicker: We're landing there because we're nearly out of fuel.

We land, and we're surrounded by emergency vehicles including an ambulance. Three passengers are allowed to leave the plane. It must have been a real emergency because the implications of not clearing customs and going straight to the hospital are clear.

So after about an hour we're up in the air again. We notice that most of our connecting flights left 20 minutes ago. Surely, I'm thinking, nobody would let a plane with a lot of old folks come in to O'Hare without a well-thought-out plan.

I thought wrong. By the time we cleared customs we found that our flights were long gone, and--worse still--that SAS didn't much care for dealing with the situation. As far as they were concerned it was the bus got there, delayed by weather. The connecting flights were on domestics anyway. Thank the stars for United, which, just coming off bankruptcy, has a lot to prove. And they did. They grabbed nearly every passenger and at the very least sent them off to a discounted hotel room with their bags checked. I had an ugly meeting with the station chief for SAS because of our company's policy of customer service. I suppose there were a hundred passengers on the SAS flight, but their attitude was dismissive, that it was all the fault of weather, and so on. Well, I bet about half of those people slept on the hard benches of O'Hare, and the SAS station chief could have cleared a lot up by calling a hotel, meeting us at the USA end of Customs, or SOMETHING. Weather happens to us at Princess too, but when it does we get right on the Best Possible Outcome, It's not always perfect, but the passengers KNOW they're being taken care of and by whom.

So I got a motel room, discounted, because of a nice lady at United. I'd been dreaming about a bath for a week. When I got to my room, the hot water wasn't working. The bed was great, but when I finally arrived there it was 2 in the morning, and the vans from 5 onward were reserved full (my flight was at 8). So I got a couple hours sleep anyway.

Security was a bit hellish, but I didn't lose anything at least. (The security in Copenhagen was wonderful.) Welcome back, they seemed to say in Chicago. We loaded up on a Canadian Regional jet, 70 passenger version, and headed down the taxi way.

A couple hours later the captain comes on and says we're going to Oklahoma City so they can look at an engine noise. So we tok off from ORD at 8 am, landed at OKA at 10 am, and we have a long wait for a part and don't get airborne again until 9 pm. I arrive AUS 10:30 pm, exactly 24 hours after I was scheduled to do so.

But I'm here and it's summer all over again.