My Book: Love Flying, Dislike Being Late

So I am in Milwaukee catching my connecting flight to New York. The plane is surprisingly big, three by three, which is big because I just flew on a one by two seated plane, lucky me got a single seat! But anyway, I’m all excited about going to New York and chatting to the two nice ladies who I’m seated next to when the stewardess walks down the aisle from the back, holding a crying man’s hand. He was speaking a little bit of English but he was crying and wailing and just looking really distressed. When they got to the front, she stood with him behind a partition while they waited for the plane to be connected with the walkway again. The pilot came out as well and they were both trying to calm this guy down. The pilot! He never comes out! So they eventually got him off the plane, with me and the ladies next to me gossiping about how now we’re going to be late, but also hoping that he was okay.

With him getting off, they had to go through the luggage and find his bags too. So we heard stuff happening below the plane and the stewardess and pilot kept on walking to the guys seat and then back up the aisle. Ten minutes later, the pilot informed us that, for security reasons, the whole plane was to deplane so that the emergency vehicles we could see outside our window (with lights flashing!) could sweep the plane to check if anything had been left behind.

An hour later, after the sniffer dogs were finished, we got back on our plane and got free tv for our troubles. I had planned to listen to my ipod but I instead enjoyed that Arnold Schwarzeneger movie with Jamie Lee Curtis where she plays his wife who doesn't know that he's actually a super secret spy.

As well as telling that short super fun story, I wanted to talk about planes and airports. I knew that planes were delayed daily and that things go wrong. For example, I remember catching the plane home from Singapore after our two week trip to Thailand and everyone (including the flight crew) were there, waiting at the gate, except the plane! After trying to locate it for half an hour, they found that the plane had gone to the wrong gate SO all of the passengers (who had already been security checked) had to trudge to a gate practically on the other side of the terminal and be security checked again. After this, we were stuck at our gate as there were planes behind us and our pilot had no room to back out. A plane traffic jam as my brother Martin likes to call them! So an hour and half after we were meant to depart, we finally flew out. So this is my one experience with something going wrong and I thought that with 9 flights in approximately three weeks, I would experience at least one thing going wrong again.

Sydney to LAX – someone’s random baggage was on our plane so we were delayed thirty minutes while we taxied back to our gate and the ground crew rummaged around for this extra baggage.

LAX to Vegas – Vegas airport had someone special flying in so as we were taxiing to the runway, we were asked to park it and wait on the tarmac for half an hour, to slow down flights going in.

San Francisco to Minnesota – Kathy and I were FIVE minutes late and couldn’t check our baggage in, meaning we missed the flight. Our fault I know but honestly, five minutes? They take hand baggage that’s too big for the overhead compartments at the plane door so five minutes is just silly

Milwaukee to New York – the crazy security threat mentioned at the beginning

Frankfurt to Prague – crazy fog at the airport so had to circle in and the pilot landed without seeing anything, crazy and scary but amazing. But again, late

The best flight I’ve had is Perth to Sydney where we were twenty minutes early. Well done Perth. Well done.

Actually, JFK to Frankfurt, forty minutes early!

So, in conclusion, I love flying but being at that point where you are about to take off or about to taxi out and then having to go back, wait and start again is exhausting and tedious.

There are unfortunately no photos that correspond with my airport complaining so, instead, here are some completely irrelevant ones that didn’t fit in other blogs!