If you fly out of New York, try to avoid a day when air traffic controller computers melt down.
Our departure from NYC went something like this:
We had to check out at noon from our hotel, so we decided to just go straight to the airport even though our flight wasn't till 5:30 p.m. The taxi ride was quick and easy and we killed a couple hours reading in the food court before heading through security. Once we reached our gate, around 3:30 or so, we heard a rumor that a flight to Detroit was cancelled due to weather.
No big deal, I thought. They're not that far from Milwaukee, though. Are they? Should have studied geography harder in school. Dang it.
We listened further to people talking around us and heard that our flight was delayed until 10 p.m., which isn't good since we needed to get to Milwaukee by 9 p.m. to make our connection to Des Moines.
I went to a Midwest flight check-in guy (I have no idea what their title is) and he confirmed the flight was delayed and was nice enough to transfer us to a direct flight to Des Moines through American Airlines.
We were a little stressed getting our luggage back and getting our new boarding passes, but we made it with some time to spare for our new 6:20 flight.
As we were headed through security a TSA worker told us ALL flights were cancelled.
What?
We decided to go through security to our gate, anyway. Turns out all flights weren't cancelled, but ours was delayed an hour or so.
At this point I'd like to mention that LaGuardia is not a very good airport. It's small, doesn't have enough Arrival/Departure video screens, and not enough televisions to help pass the time. And they are really poor at communicating.
Flights were being cancelled left and right and we didn't really have any idea why.
The weather might have had something to do with it, too. From what we were told there was a system stretching from Texas to Canada, and they weren't letting any westbound traffic out of the airport.
The communication from airport officials was pretty frustrating. We never officially heard anything about a computer glitch, but I called up Aaron and he read a story to me about LaGuardia being the hardest hit from it.
Eventually around 9 p.m. we were told we could start boarding our plane - but it was a little premature. The plane hadn't been cleaned yet. Then the pilot put the plane in "holding" and we were told to wait around. And wait. And wait. I thought for sure the flight would be cancelled and called my brother who lives in Brooklyn to make arrangements in case we needed to stay there the night.
Eventually more and more flights seemed to be departing and we were called to board our plane (for real!). We sat another hour and a half waiting for clearance from the tower and we were finally on our way after 11 p.m., about 11 hours after we arrived at the airport.
We were quite tired through the three hour flight home, and thankfully slept through a lot of it.
That was pretty much our only misfortune on our trip to New York, but it was a stressful one.
Oh, and on our flight out we heard news of the JFK Terror plot arrests, so we were book-ended by New York airport oddities.
Pictures from the trip can be found here (with more on the way) and I'll update with more from our trip soon.
Posted by alangage at June 10, 2007 11:00 AM
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