Captain John in Chicago
The Fire Brigade has been on the move again here at Piper, mere days after getting back from the week long trip that included the dinner among the polar bears in Central Park and the "Talk Like a Pirate" session at McFadden's Saloon. Last week I went out to Chicago for the day, sans any other firefighting accompaniment, and then later in the week a Baltimore fireman came to me in DC. This week one of our member is in Orlando and I and two of the Baltimoreans are in New York.
But before I get to the NY trip, I want to describe the torture of my day trip to Chicago last week. I was on the 8:30 a.m. flight which should have gotten me to Chicago with 2.5 hours to spare before my noon witness interview. I planned to use that 2.5 hours to get my host law firm to copy some documents, make some phone calls, eat lunch, powder my nose, etc. We all get on the nice airplane and the captain comes on to say that we can't push back because there had been some "routine maintenance" the night before on the plane which now requires "unusual" paperwork. This sounded suspicious to me. But I am not worried and think to myself how smart I was to get the early flight so that minor delays like this would be no problem at all. The captain said they were waiting for the paperwork to come over their cockpit computer. I again think how smart I was to plan ahead. Then five minutes later he says the paperwork had arrived and that we were off….and we started to push back.
We roll out to the end of the runway and get in take-off position and then oddly we keep rolling and go around in a big circle and end up in a place I know from prior experience to be an airplane parking space of purgatory -- a place where airplanes go and power down and turn off an engine or two and wait for something interminably slow to happen, such as another airplane to arrive that has just taken off 3,000 miles away, or some mechanic to find a bolt in the 9,000 square foot warehouse in Crystal City.
The Parking Space of Purgatory is never a good place to be. Last time I as in it was because high winds had grounded all incoming flights to LaGuardia, of which I was one. I see another airplane come and join us in the parking lot. The sky is gray but not terribly so, the weather seemed fine to me. I figure airplanes are waterproof so what's a little condensation? Then another plane joins us in the parking lot.
The captain finally comes on and explains that while the weather in DC is fine, and the weather in Chicago is at the moment fine, the weather in between the two is just downright rotten. He tells us there is a ground hold on one runway into Chicago because of weather on the approach, and that the route between us and them is overly congested as a result, and that therefore no planes are allowed to take off for Chicago for another 40 minutes, at least. He says the planes next to us are in the same fix. But mercifully he turns off the fasten seat belt sign, lets us turn on our handheld electronic devices, and even lets us move freely about the cabin. Again, I think how smart I was to build in a 2.5 hour buffer. 40 minutes is nothing to me.
Half an hour later, the plane next to us revs up its engines and taxis back to its gate. We all peer nervously out the windows at it as it rolls away. Where is it going? Did someone get sick? Did they forget the bags of peanuts? We sense that the disappearance of our neighbor is not a good sign for us. About ten minutes later our captain comes on and explains that airplane had gone back to its gate to get more gas because as things were going it wouldn't have had enough gas to get to Chicago, once we were allowed off the ground. I think how smart I was to fly United instead of American. United doesn't appear to care at all about controlling costs, based on what I read in the papers, so I was sure we had a veritable surfeit of wasteful gas on board, plenty to get to Chicago. Otherwise wouldn't we be taxiing back to our gate, too?
But the captain keeps talking and says that if we're not allowed off the ground in the next ten minutes, then we're going to have to go back and get more gas, too. Grr. I wondered why they couldn't just drive the gas trucks out to us in the Parking Space from Purgatory. Airplanes don't move very fast on the ground. The gas trucks could go much faster.
But of course about 30 seconds after air traffic control clears us to take off, we have to go back and get more gas. At this point we're an hour and a half behind schedule. And the re-fueling takes another half an hour. So by the time we finally get to Chicago I have only half an hour to get into downtown from the airport and race up to the 55th floor of the building I was in to find the witness. (By the way, when we finally did get to Chicago, the weather was extremely bad -- sideways rain, winds, etc.) The final straw was when the taxi I was in tried to cross the Chicago River within sight of my final destination, the drawbridge was up. So we had to crawl around some detour with all the rest of lunch-time Chicago traffic.
I got to my witness 5 minutes after we were supposed to start.
6.5 hours later, I went back out to the airport to try to get home. At least the taxi ride out to O'Hare was an efficient 25 minutes. Things were looking good. I got to the airport in time to go standby on the earlier flight -- the 7:30 flight instead of the 8:45. Things were looking better. I also go standby for first class on the later flight. What more could one want? I pass through security effortlessly. Excellent. I get to the gate, however, to see that my "early" flight is delayed so much that it is supposed to leave at the same time as the later flight I was originally on, the one I'm waitlisted for first class. I decide to myself that I'd rather go first class than standby on some wretched middle seat. But I make no changes because they're not even calling standbys on the "early" flight for another hour.
So I go eat a fabulous bowl of chili at Chili's -- I'm sure many of you know it well. The one in Concourse B, Terminal 1. The chili really was amazing.I return to the gate to see that the "early" flight now had an aircraft at the gate, but the later flight (the first class one) did not. But the first class flight was displaying a sign asking to see the passenger "holding seat 10F." Which was me. I think they really meant the passenger who was assigned to seat 10F, not the passenger who was "holding" the seat, technically speaking. Those seats are pretty unwieldly. I figured they wanted to tell me that I had been upgraded. Which was sort of theoretical, really, since there was no airplane.
I elected to eschew the first class upgrade and get on the airplane that was actually at the gate ready to receive passengers. To reward me for my brilliance, United gave me a fabulous seat on the "early" plane -- seat 6A (bulkhead window).
At this point the heavens opened. I was listening to Frank Sinatra's "Out of the tree of life I just picked me a plum..." on my iPod and I looked up out of the all-glass Terminal B to see unbelievable lightening and the strongest rain I have ever seen. The rain was coming down so hard on the glass terminal that one couldn't see anything at all outside. I thought the glass terminal was going to break. Everybody tried to back away from the windows but there wasn't really anywhere to go because the entire place is made of glass. So we all huddled in shapeless, amoeba-like form, moving irresolutely around the middle of Terminal B in a very slow circle. Sort of like people circling the thingamabob in Mecca.
Airplanes were sitting out in the alleys, not able to approach their gates. The reason was it was too fierce for the men with the orange glow sticks (I'm sure there's a technical name for them) to go out and wave the planes in. The rain went on for easily half an hour. At one point the captain of our airplane-to-be came out and explained that they couldn't board our plane, even though it was there, because it was too dangerous for the baggage handlers to go out in the weather to unload the bags from the last flight. And of course that meant they couldn't load the bags for our flight either. So we all just sat around and watched the rain. I thought about how I was much happier to be in the terminal watching the rain than sitting on one of the airplanes out in the alley waiting for a man with orange glow sticks. What if they ran out of gas out there, 20 feet from the gate? I guess the gas truck would move over a few feet to accomodate that, once the gas truck drivers were allowed outside again. Then they would get all gassed up and roll 20 feet into the gate and turn off their engines again. Pretty stupid. Unless those gas trucks are capable of only putting maybe one gallon of gas in an airplane and then stopping. Seems unlikely.
Eventually the rain stopped and all the airport workers were allowed back outside to do their jobs and so we got on our airplane. Then our captain (who's name was John, Captain John) came out and told us that not surprisingly, 30 or 40 airplanes were all trying to get out of Chicago at the same time, so even though we were on the plane there was going to be a very slow taxi ride and very long wait out on the runways to take off. He told us to expect another 40 minutes or so before we would take off, which by this time (in case you wondering what time it was by now) we would be landing at National at 1:15 a.m. He reassured us, however, that we had plenty of gas.
And that's exactly what happened. We headed out into the rain in our airplane and rolled inch by inch, very slowly down the taxi way. It was very dark out, because of the weather. Everyone on the plane was silent due to exhaustion. Which was marvelous. The cabin lights were off. We rolled around out in the furthest reaches of the taxi-way, among the bullddozers and the earthmovers and the spare emergency vehicles. We passed the international cargo terminal -- going 1.5 miles an hour so we could memorize the names of all the cargo planes and figure out to say "America" in Polynesian (on the underbelly of a Malay airliner). The sodium lights were orange. we passed mothballed airplanes, light only by the occassional flood light. It was very very quiet yet very very rainy. And dark. I had no idea which was was north or which way we were facing in relationship to Chicago. I just peered out the window into the night. I no longer cared what time we got home. It didn't matter. There was nothing I could do about it anyway. I was in a little dark airplane in the middle of a very rain night right smack in the middle of the continent of North America, listening to the emotionless voices over Channel 9 of the control tower dealing with the chaos of 40 stranded airplanes. I felt the way I used to feel as a child landing in some godforsaken stop-over in Angola, or the Cameroon, on a 12 hour flight from New York to Lusaka or something similarly wretched. Just staring out into the inscrutable thick night, with my entire fate in the hands of complete strangers.
Fortunately, O'Hare had but a very senior controller on duty to try to get the planes off the ground as fast as possible. He was extremely good. All the pilots were being cooperative. A few of them had only fifteen minutes or so to get off the ground before timing out of their federally regulated hours (how annoyed would you be to be on THAT plane?), so the controller jumped them in the line and all the other pilots understood. Captain John was laconic. Eventually we got to the front of the line and the controller asked Captain John if he would be ready in "two minutes." Captain John deadpanned, "I'm ready now." (emphasis on "now"). And then we took off.
And the flight was perfect. Pitch dark up in the sky too but smooth above the clouds. The only other planes in the sky were DHL and Fed Ex planes, and the other planes that had been stuck in Chicago. When we landed silently in the dark at National it was 1:30 a.m. and still 90 degrees out. Captain John came on to wake everybody up. "We thought you'd like to know that we're here." he said. Everybody clapped.
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