Air Travel Woes
Air travel today is far from an exact science.
As described by Michael Crichton in Jurassic Park, Chaos Theory is illustrated by the conjecture that if a butterfly flaps its wings in (for example) San Francisco, a hurricane can be spawned in the Pacific Ocean as a direct result of that wing-flap. In other words, a seemingly disconnected small event can directly trigger larger ones farther (further?) down the line.
(What’s the difference between ‘further’ and ‘farther’, anyway? Is there a rule?)
I now officially consider myself a frequent flyer, with all the rights and bad experiences that go with that title. My flight to SC last Thursday was delayed by a flat tire, of all things. Weighed down by two carry-ons, a suit coat and winter coat, I was no sooner seated with the other ‘last passenger’ when the captain came on the loudspeaker to say that ‘someone noticed the front tire was low’. Shouldn’t they have some better way of checking on that stuff? Like a checklist or something? Anyway, he promised us that the ground crew could pump up the tire in only two minutes, but that everyone would have to get off the plane while they did it. We would be allowed to leave our personal items at our seats.
Actually, it took nearly half an hour, during the first part of which time we all stood coldly in the little tent/walkway (taking the place of a raised jetway) while the Tarmac Person entertained us animatedly with a harmonica. After it became patently obvious that the tire-changing was going to take much longer than the promised two minutes, the little flyi.com person ushered all fifty passengers back into the terminal waiting area.
Then the fun began.
Because we had been allowed to leave our personal items and carry-on luggage at our seats on the plane, some (former) passengers didn’t have their cell phones to call their various concerned parties in Greenville. Worse, some passengers had left both their boarding passes and photo ID in their carry-ons (I hadn’t).
“Boy, this isn’t a security nightmare or anything,” I muttered with mild sarcasm to a nice middle-aged woman and her sister who had been sitting across from me on the plane, and had somehow now managed to sit next to me in the waiting area. After thirty minutes of this nonsense, the airline decided to just take people’s last names and verify their ticket. I thought such looseness was nice of them, but just a little bit disturbing, considering that we were in a Washington D.C. airport, allowing people to board a plane on their word that they were who they said they were.
On the trip back tonight, there was some mixup about my plane having turned around after leaving Washington (therefore not being in SC to fly me home), and a cancelled flight to Orlando being repurposed as the new flight to Washington, and it all taking an hour to sort out before the actual passengers were told anything whatsoever. The fact that the digital flight schedule screens obliviously listed my flight as On Time and then Departed didn’t help either.
And when I finally got out to my car (in the GOLD lot; about as far away from the terminal as one can possibly park) I had to scrape a quarter inch of ice off the windshield. Next time I’ll consider paying $6/day extra for a parking garage with a covered walkway to the terminal, or else just giving Tim some money for gas and asking him to drop me off. That might work, too.
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