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My Sleepover at the Airport

Today has been one of the longer days I’ve had in a while. I flew back to Los Angeles today (Saturday). My flight was originally scheduled to leave Houston at 10:56pm Friday night. I checked the flight status many times online before I went to the airport. The flight was first delayed to a 11:30pm departure and then another hour to 12:30am. I was flying on Continental Airlines, and their website said that even though flights may be listed as delayed, travelers should make it to the airport in time for their originally scheduled departure in case last minute changes were made that allowed the flight to leave as scheduled.

So my parents and I made it to the airport around 10:20pm. The flight had been further delayed, with a new estimated departure of 1:30am. I asked one of the Continental personnel members how late it would have to be delayed before it would be canceled outright. She said there was no cut-off per se, but the problem would be with the crew. The reason the flight was getting delayed was because Continental was waiting for the aircraft to arrive from Denver. It would be possible if the plane could not leave from Denver in time that the crew would not be allowed to takeoff because of FAA regulations that limit the amount of continuous time one crew can serve.

After a little bit more waiting before checking in, the estimated departure was moved up to 12:55am. This inspired confidence; surely they wouldn’t move the departure up if they weren’t sure things were moving smoothly. I then decided to check in. Security at that hour was a breeze, and I made it to the gate with the intention of killing an hour and a half or so waiting to board.

Around 11:30pm, the estimated departure was moved back to a little after 1:00am. Eventually the aircraft arrived, the other passengers got off the plane, the cleaning crew did their job, and the security check was performed. We were then allowed to board. Once we were on the plane, a flight attendant informed us that it was 1:16am, and that the crew had to be in the air at 1:44am to avoid “timing out”. Everyone was urged to get to their seat quickly so we could get in the air.

We left the gate and taxied out to the runway. We were idling there for a little bit, and the clock was definitely working against us. At 1:51am on my watch, the flight attendant came back on and said the crew had just officially timed out and “with a heavy heart” he had to let us know that we would be returning to the gate. Our flight would then be scheduled to depart in approximately eight hours, which was around 10:00am or so.

When we got back to the gate, we learned there were no hotel rooms available. Continental was making one of their group rooms available which was going to have sofas and cots. By the time I made it down there, all the cots had been taken. There were no sofas, just individual chairs that people had grabbed two at a time to push together to form makeshift beds. Tough luck for me.

I decided to walk back to the gate and kill the next seven hours there. They had a television tuned to CNN, so I watched a bit about the execution of Saddam Hussein and a possible airport bombing in Madrid. About an hour or so later, someone told us over the microphone at the gate that they had good news, and our flight would be departing at 7:00am. And that really did feel like good news. Killing time gets old for obvious reasons, so having to kill three fewer hours was something worth celebrating.

I made it until 5:30am, and I walked over to one of the restaurants that was opening for the day so I could get a decent breakfast. I had some eggs, potatoes, bacon, and orange juice. It doesn’t make up for not getting any sleep at night, but it provided some much needed energy. Slowly the time to board the plane neared. It turned out that I had to stand in a long line to get a new boarding pass printed. No airline personnel mentioned to anyone that this was necessary. In fact, late that night after the failed takeoff attempt, they told us that the flight number would be the same and our old boarding passes would be used to board again in the morning. Anyway, after an unannounced change in flight number I finally got my new boarding pass and got on the plane.

About two-thirds of the people had gotten onto the plane when one of the flight attendants got on the speaker and informed us that due to an error a second security check had not been performed after we departed the plane several hours earlier. We would all have to pick up our belongings and exit the plane again. You would figure this would be no big deal given what we had already gone through, right? The security check is a ten minute procedure. But this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Many of us had gone the whole night without sleep, so moving all of our crap into the plane and taking our seat was the last thing we had to do in what had been a very long evening. Being so short of energy, the idea of packing up all my stuff, walking off the plane and then re-boarding was incredibly painful.

But what are you going to do? So we packed up our stuff, got off the plane, waited fifteen minutes and then re-boarded. The flight attendants went through their regular pre-flight routine. One of them was telling us about the movie on the flight. The movie, according to the flight attendant, was called Miss Little Sunshine. Well, the movie is actually called Little Miss Sunshine, but somehow that mistake as it was relayed to the passengers just seemed to wrap the whole day up in my mind. It was a trivial mistake, something that would make no difference to anyone. But in a day of mistakes, it just seemed very appropriate that the flight personnel couldn’t even tell us the name of the movie correctly.

I arrived in Los Angeles around 9am. After an hour or so of waiting for my bags, it was clear I wouldn’t be able to make it out to Pasadena on the shuttle to get my car in time to make it back to the airport to pick Ariele up at 11:30am. So I carried my bags from terminal six to terminal seven, grabbed a seat, and listened to music for an hour waiting for Ariele. Her baggage pickup went much more smoothly than mine did, and after the usual Super Shuttle nonsense, we got to our apartment at 2pm. So, I left my parents’ place around 9pm Central time Friday night and got to my apartment around 2pm Pacific time Saturday afternoon. A nineteen hour day of travel to go halfway across the continental United States.

I’m glad it’s over.