My wife and I went on vacation in Europe. I expected flights from hell somewhere, but was pleasantly surprised that, except for a 2 hour delay on our way from PHI to Zürich, all travel arrangements went as planned. Still, if not a flight from hell, at least a modest test of endurance getting home from Milan, Italy…
5:38 AM: Catch train to Malpensa Airport. We’ve never been there so we arrive a couple of hours early. They insist we check our carry on bags. I’ve never been refused using this bag as a carry on before. This means we will need to wait for baggage to clear customs later in PHI and we still have a final connecting flight to catch after that. Drink Red Bull and wait bleary eyed. No gate yet for our flight. Milan was currently inundated with mosquitoes and they made it into the airport of course. Our flight did not yet have a gate assigned and so we waited in a mosquito-filled main terminal area. 7:30AM no gate. 8AM no gate. 8:30 no gate. All the other flights have gates. Ah, we finally have a gate and things move along well. Flight to Frankfurt leaves relatively on time.
10:15AM: Arrive in Frankfurt. Everyone is coffeed up and ready to get off the plane and hit the bathrooms. But wait, we’re not taxiing to the terminal. We’re going in the opposite direction. We deplane on the tarmac and are taken by bus about a mile to a central terminal. I have never seen so many squirmy guys holding it in. The bus finally arrives and we burst out. Alas, only two working urinals in the first bathroom. I’m in and out! Guy’s faces are turning green.
10:45AM: Take the Sky Tram to terminal C to catch our USAir flight to Philadelphia.
11:00AM: In the process of getting to the gate we go through 5 security checks. One is official immigration. Then at the top of the stairs to their terminal, USAir asks us for our passports, boarding passes, and asks us a series of security questions. We then go down the stairs and through a standard x-ray security line (passports and boarding passes please). After that, we can either stand (no seats) in a central area that sells food and has bathrooms, or otherwise go to the secure gate where there are seats. This entails getting in line and speaking to a USAir staff person (passports and boarding passes please). She reissues us new boarding passes in place of the ones we got from Lufthansa. We then go through the turnstile to our gate and are met by another USAir staff person who is standing just 3 feet from the last transaction and she (I kid you not) asks for our boarding passes and passports. Not sure what we could have done in those couple of steps, but OK. After running this gauntlet we can now sit for about 90 minutes until our flight boards.
1:15 PM: Boarding goes fine. We’re riding an Airbus A330. It is designed to pack them in for the haul. There is zero leg room. Our little jet from Milan to Frankfurt had substantially more leg room than this behemoth. However, we settle in, watch some video, sleep, stretch, eat, watch a family in a neighboring row deal with their 3 year old daughter’s continuous air sickness for 8 hours and 40 minutes of flight time. All and all, it was actually fine. But it is a very long flight when you’ve already trained and planed and are not yet done.
3:45 PM: Arrive in Philly and head to their Immigration>Baggage Claim>Customs gauntlet. Crap, another big plane in at the same time, we have to get our checked bags, and we’ve got 1 hour 45 minutes to get over to the commuter terminal on the other side of the airport. Long line, nice immigration guy, bags show up, we don’t have anything to declare. We’re through in an hour and have about 45 minutes to spare. We’re going to make it!
4:45 PM: Head around a corner and into… a standard x-ray security check line? What could we have done since being checked 5 times in Frankfurt and then never leaving a secure area since deplaning??? Oh crap. So after almost 20 hours it comes to this. I have to take my shoes off and hand over passports and boarding passes again! If I wasn’t so exhausted I’d probably have lost it.
Hurry through, put shoes back on, put passport and boarding pass away for the last time! Off to another shuttle bus, then down to our gate. Plane is there, we are there, we have all our bags, which we did not recheck. We are going to make it.
We board and pull from the gate, but then stop on the tarmac as the pilot tells us bad weather is approaching and the airport is shutting down most departure corridors. Everyone is getting “rerouted” and no time estimate on when we’ll go. The storms blow in. We sit in the plane. The pilot tells us we can get our cell phones back out because he doesn’t know how long we’ll be waiting. Many planes are lined up on the runways. Not looking good.
Oh, so close but so far. So tired. I get out my phone and before it can completely power up, the pilot says, “Folks we have been cleared and rerouted, so put those phones away and let’s get out of here.” I figure there was only a small window for our little 1 hour prop job flight. Go man go!
So, all in all, it wasn’t a flight from hell. Everything ultimately went right. No cancelled flights, no lost bags, no creepy passengers. But, 21 hours of trains, planes, buses, Sky Trams, and taxis were very tiring and that’s when it all went right. If things had started to go wrong, it would be real hell.
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