So I’m stuck at Reagan National-again. No great story this time. 7 hours delayed so far for a simple day trip down and back.
So I will leave it at this: I’m stuck here with Bernie Sanders.
What’s your airport story?
Hi to Bernie!!! 
I don’t have a good story to share - luckily I guess!
I seemed to have developed an inability to get through TSA with my possessions. Last trip, I got Pre-check both ways. Good right? No. The first one the woman said I had to take out my electronics after I was ready to go through, it confused me so much I had my license and boarding pass in my hand, must have set them down, and didn’t realize it until I was on the train to the gate. Had to swim upstream and risk getting arrested by TSA to retrieve.
On the return trip, again got pre-check but it was waaay down the line. Went through, got on the wrong tram to the wrong gates. Returned and they made me go through security again. Put my phone in my jacket pocket, left jacket on the screening belt. Out on the tram, back on the tram, swimming upstream, found the pink jacket clearly no one else wanted. So much for a snack before boarding. Oh, and they changed my gate so I was waiting and waiting and almost missed boarding.
Last year coming home from Orlando to Boston the flight was first delayed. We then left about 3 hours late. One hour into the flight, they closed Logan and the plane turned around and went back to Orlando. By having my husband book it from the internet, we snagged the last room in the hotel which is actually inside the Orlando airport. Got a flight out the next morning.
It’s been a long time since I was stuck in an airport. Curious why you are stuck at Reagan so long? Surely not weather? I live in the DC area - dh flew home from Boston this evening with no issues. Hopefully your flight problems are resolved soon.
My worst experience with flying occurred when I was flying from National Airport to JFK (or maybe it was LaGuardia)back in 1989. I was headed to Rome for a study abroad program with heavy luggage. The plan was to stay at my college roommate’s house on Long Island that night and then she would take me to JFK the next morning for my flight to Rome. My parents happily dropped me off at National then headed to the Kennedy Center for a concert. Except after they dropped me off, it started to snow. Heavily. We had boarded the plane and taxied out from the gate, and then sat on the runway for a very long time. Our departure time kept getting pushed back. I think we sat on the plane for a couple of hours. They still didn’t cancel our flight. Finally they taxied back to gate where they let anyone off who wanted though our flight was still scheduled but with no departure time in sight. I had met another college student on my flight and we decided that we’d get a taxi together to Union Station and get a train to NY. All the while my parents had no idea as they were at the concert. The airline did get us our luggage, then we got a taxi to Union Station where I called my roommate and told her my plan. It was snowing heavily up and down the east coast. I arrived at Penn Station around 11:30pm, think I then made my way to Grand Central and got the very last train on the LIRR out to Long Island where my roommate’s father picked me up after midnight.Fortunately, I went to college in NYC so knew my way around the transportation system! I look back at this now in awe that I figured all this out on my own, with no cell phones, just pay phones and a calling card. And a message left on the answering machine at home for my parents letting them know my new plans. All I knew was the I HAD to get to NYC so I didn’t miss my flight to Rome the next morning. It was a hellishly long day of travel, with a crapload of luggage for a semester in Italy that I had to schlep all over DC and NYC.
So not really an airport story, but my version of trains, planes and automobiles. Something I wonder if any of my teenagers could manage now on their own in the same situation w/o multiple frantic calls and texts. I was much more independent.
Best of luck getting to your destination soon.
We actually boarded and got on the runway, but mechanical issues so we aborted. They have 7 planes with mechanical issues tonight. I usually have a delay, but never this long. They also are saying “weather”, but not where the weather problem is, bc it’s not here!
I think my status got me a seat on the last flight (sorry whomever she bumped). So even if I get nothing else from it, I got that!
“They have 7 planes with mechanical issues tonight. I usually have a delay, but never this long.”
Union issues??
Hadn’t thought of that…
My younger daughter lived in NYC for two years, long enough for us to start making bitter comments about booking the last flight of the day from LGA to Milwaukee on Friday nights. Something always happened!
Not really a “stuck at the airport” story, but my last flight to LA was kind of comical. I was flying out solely for a lunch meeting, then heading immediately back home.
So they start boarding my plane, then the boarding line stops moving for a good 20 minutes. The gate agents announce that there’s a mess on the plane and they have a special crew coming to clean it up. We wait and wait and wait and finally 30 mins later get to board. So we’re all buckled in, doors closed and ready to push back but we’re just sitting there. And sitting. Pilot comes on to announce there’s a broken tray table that won’t stay closed and we have to wait for engineering to come fix it.
Of course I’m watching the clock the whole time because “lunch meeting”, right? Anyway finalllly the tray table gets fixed by a crack team of FAA-certified expert engineers and we take off. Land at LAX and turns out traffic on the airport tarmac is as bad as the freeways. We’re taxiing for probably 30 minutes with the pilot giving us a play by play “waiting for a plane to clear an intersection in front of us”, “now we’re waiting for something else”, etc.
So we reach the gate, but that magic seatbelt chime isn’t dinging. Pilot comes on and says literally, “ok now this is getting just plain embarrassing but there’s a plane at our gate”. So we have to wait for the plane to clear our gate. Anyway, a ridiculous comedy of delays but I made my lunch meeting only 15 mins late instead of my original plan of 3 hours early.
Not really a stuck in airport story, though one year in this story we did spend the night in Dulles Airport. We travel from Asia to Maine every summer. For five years we didn’t make it to Maine as scheduled. Always that last flight from whatever hub to Maine, mechanical problems, pilots already flew too many hours, construction on runway in Portland, etc. One year we finally made it to Maine on the night scheduled though three hours late. However, that year it took three days to get out of Maine as scheduled due to a whole litany of mechanical problems plus a typhoon in the Pacific. Now we just expect it to be an annual epic.
My daughter was coming home for Christmas during her Peace Corps stint. Medical emergency over the Black Sea forced a landing at a resort town in Romania. There was one hotel and one runway. It was snowing, which it never did there so they had to wait until morning when the crews could deice the plane. Theirs was the only plane there so no other options. Then she got to Munich and her flight was cancelled so she spent 24 hours there. She got in 52 hours after she was supposed to. A friend had flown in to see her and had been at our house two days already. The next morning, the friend was telling her where bowls, etc were because we had moved while she was gone.
We were diverted to Iceland on the way to London several years ago. It was a big deal b/c we were flying United which has no presence there (and our crew took off after we landed). The incident went all the way up to the president of United and the airline ended up renting an Icelandair plane and crew to get us to London. If we had known we were going to spend 8 hours there we would have rented a cab and toured Reykjavik.Oh well… at least my kids learned a few words in Icelandic!
I hate flying – not because of the actual experience of flying, but because of all the problems one encounters. There was a period of about 10 years when I was like Typhoid Mary – delayed every single trip. It has improved for me, but I still have very low expectations.
One thing I’ve learned: If possible, connect through a warm-weather airport, not through Chicago, anytime between November and May. (Given that my two sons are in North Dakota and Wisconsin, that’s not possible for me anymore.)
Another thing: Never plan to take the last flight of the day to your destination. If it’s canceled, you’re up the creek without a paddle.
I’ve got a stuck in the airplane and almost at the airport story. We were moving to Europe and circled the destination airport for quite some time because they were having problems with wind and the pilot couldn’t land. Eventually we were re-routed and landed at another airport. In another country. And taxied off to some big area not near a gate. We waited. And waited. We were told they were trying to decide whether to attempt to go back to the original destination, or have us deplane and they would BUS us to the other airport. As in hours in a bus. Meanwhile, we’re stuck in our seats getting no food or drink, and flight attendants are yelling at people who are getting up to use the bathroom.
(It should surprise no one that this is a domestic carrier.)
Our visas needed to be stamped upon entry to the country, and since we were in the Schengen zone, if we go through customs at this airport and ride a bus across the border, we wouldn’t have a stamp for entry into the country our visas are for. So we’re starting to panic a little bit about not getting our visas validated.
After we’d been on the ground for over 2 hours (after a 7+ hour flight + the time spent circling the original airport) there’s the “hurry up and get ready for takeoff we’re heading back to the original destination” announcement. So we fly back, circle a few more times, and make the second scariest landing I’ve ever experienced.
Only to taxi and sit. It’s still extremely windy. So windy that ground operations have been suspended.
I honestly can’t remember how much longer we sat, but we were literally to the point now of divvying up the last of the Sweet Tarts and two granola bars we had left. The kiddos were hungry and had been sitting on that airplane for twice as long as we’d expected.
Eventually we get off. We make it through customs and immigration and our visas in our passports are stamped. We wait over an hour for our luggage and discover the rental car company had closed earlier in the day when flights weren’t getting through and didn’t bother to reopen when airport operations resumed.
It was a nightmare. Our kiddos were troopers through the whole thing and eventually we reached our destination hotel for the night. But since then, I always bring excessive amounts of snacks and water on every flight!
Not too long ago, we missed our connection from Hong Kong to San Francisco to East Coast. We were therefore stuck in SFO for > 10 H. The airline gave us vouchers for a free lunch. They told us they would pay for us to go to a local hotel and sleep, but we stayed at the airport for fear that going thru long security lines again would make us miss our flight. Kids slept with their blankets stretched out at the gate. Lots of people staring and laughing at them, but they didn’t understand our predicament. Can’t go through SFO again without seeing it all again. Next time that happens, will hunker down with a round loaf of Boudin sourdough. At least I won’t be hungry.
The most dramatic was last summer. I flew from the Philippines to Texas. Three flights, one a Korean Air the others American. I knew I’d have a long, like eight hour, lay over in Seoul, but that was okay. There are sleeping coaches in that airport, several located in quiet places. Heck, there are tours of the city for those with more energy. I found a couch and took a nap. (Google “sleeping in airports.” There is a guide for what to do.)
The bad part was the second segment. Bad weather diverted us from landing in Dallas. The pilot announced we would land…somewhere. He didn’t have the fuel after such a long flight to keep circling in Dallas. So we flew away from the weather and landed in Austin. Many of us on the lane were pretty excited, thinking we’d just get off here. For some it was home, for others, closer to home than Dallas. Our plane landed and then parked off in a corner. We needed more fuel. One guy said he could see where he parked his car in long term parking. But no, we couldn’t deplane. No explanation given, (I wonder if it had to do with immigration; maybe no customs available? IDK) Anyway after the long flight from Seoul, we sat on the ground for about three hours more. There was a rumor the flight crew was about to hit their work time limit. A rumor started by the flight crew. Would that mean we could get off, we wondered.
Abruptly we took off again. Good thing, since we were running out of food and drink. We were going to Dallas, now four hours late. By the time I got off the plane and cleared customs, I was five hours late, had missed my connection, was foggy brained and confused. I knew I had to go through TSA security and get rebooked. I found security, but couldn’t find a human being to help me. None of the electronic kiosks seemed to work. The airport was chaotic from the storm and all the cancellations. I just started heading toward where my gate would have been had we been on time. I just had to find a person to talk to…
Lo and behold, my connection was still there! It was six hours late. There was a plane full of pissed off people and one happy person…me.
A happy-ish ending!!
A number of years ago I was flying home from Newark to Chicago after a meeting with 3 coworkers. Sitting in Newark looking at both the local weather and the weather in Chicago I told my counterparts we would take off but end up in Detroit by the end of the night.
We were delayed in the terminal for 4 hours before boarding and then delayed another 3 before takeoff. There was one “window” of clear weather in the NY area so 3 airports had to rotate takeoffs through that one window. Once in the air everything looked good and the Chicago skyline was in sight. Suddenly the plane made a hard right turn and the announcement was made we were heading to Indianapolis (I was close but had guessed the wrong city we would end up in).
We landed in Indi and were parked way out as that were going to wait out the weather. They announced that they would let us off the plane, but not back on so unless Indi was your final destination to stay on the plane. There were no rental cars or hotels to be had so the only option was stay where we were. My coworkers had a friend in town that they decided to stay with and figure out a rental car in the morning, by this time it was after midnight and I decided to stick it out.
I was seated in the back of the plane, next to the galley, and the flight attendants were at their wits end. We had been on the plane so long they were out of ice and were serving the upset passengers warm water and passengers were upset. They were so busy with the front of the plane they told those of us in the back to help ourselves to anything in the galley as they were going to be stuck in the front of the plane. This turned out to be the silver lining, the bar was fully stocked and about 4 of us had unfettered access to the bar. We ended up becoming fast friends and drank the plane dry over the next few hours, making the long delay a little more tolerable.
We did eventually get back to Chicago sometime after about 3:30am. I called my boss on the way home and left him a voicemail about the circumstances and that I was going to sleep in and log in from home later in the morning. Next thing I know my phone starts ringing about 7:30am and I was told that because my coworkers would be traveling back that day I had to be in the office to cover their work and to catch a train and be in by 9:00. A very long day ensued covering 4 desks on a couple hours of sleep while those coworkers rolled into town at about noon, returned the rental car and then took the rest of the day off due to their awful travel experience.
My best and worst stuck in the airport story involves a charter flight. You have no rights as a charter passenger, FYI.
It had snowed 7-9" that day but we were still scheduled to leave JFK by midnight, heading to Rio de Janiero. The lines were simply hideous to check bags and get a boarding pass. My friend and I were in a zen state of calm happiness that can come upon you when you survive a 3 hour drive to the airport on icy roads (Connecticut, back then, had no state income tax and didn’t salt the roads).
Everyone else was furious! At one point, an angry man with a heavy accent grabbed the PA mic from the gate agent and started cursing into it, “sheeeeeeet, sheeeeeeeeeet!!”
By 3 AM we were on the plane. A very drunk group of Conrail workers on vacation were taking flash photos of each other in the row in front of us. Then they realized the lens cap was on. I sighed and looked out the window. Why were all those people staring up at the wing? What were they conferring about?
Off the plane! A food service truck had tapped one of the engines. A piece of metal needed to be welded. By the time that could happen, FAA rules dictated that the flight crew get a good night’s sleep so we couldn’t leave until late morning.
Angry man with a heavy accent got off the plane, started pulling the arms off of the airport furniture and threw several of them at the big glass windows before he was led away by security. Flight attendants brought out the heavy carts of our meals for the would-be flight and ran away. Literally ran! Zen-calm friend and I handed out the meals. There was no fighting. Would you like chicken or pasta?
We stayed in the airport since we really didn’t know when our flight would leave the next day and we had no other options anyway. Those floors are hard!
Eventually, we got to Rio. We arrived late at night. It seemed appropriate.