Top this nightmare travel story!

Feb 05, 2022

Afternoon Update

Saturday, February 5, 2022

By Ken Tingley

Flying these days is a means to an end. We tolerate it to get to a nice vacation spot or to simply get home again. It is functional, but hardly luxurious or enjoyable.

Like most things, we remember the bad experiences more than the good. Put a group of seasoned travelers together in a room with a couple of cocktails and you will find multiple experiences where flights were canceled, luggage lost or we were stranded at a far away airport.

I once lost my luggage in Chicago going out and coming back on the same trip. I’ve watched airplanes back away from the gate with me standing there helplessly while the staff refused told me it was too late. And that helpless feeling of checking the airport monitor and seeing the dreaded “Canceled” next to your flight without any explanation.

But I never saw anything quite like the nightmare my son experienced Friday into Saturday.

Our son Joseph is starting a new job Monday in the Boston area. While we are excited for him, we’re probably a little more excited for ourselves. We hope we will get to see him more often.

We’ve been looking forward to his visit this weekend all week, but the impending snowstorm caused some concern about his flight on Friday. He was flying out of San Antonio to Atlanta before heading on to Albany. Since Atlanta was expecting nothing more than rain, I was not concerned.

After a morning flight out of San Antonio, he found his afternoon flight to Albany had been canceled. The next flight at 9:44 p.m. was full.

They offered him two options - worse and worst. It was a three-pronged approach that had him crisis-crossing the country but it would get him home a little after midnight. The second option was to wait until Saturday night for the 9:44 flight to Albany. He took option No. 1:

- 4:55 p.m. - Fly from Atlanta to Reagan International in Washington D.C. where he would have a two-hour layover.

- 8:40 p.m. - Fly from D.C. to Detroit where he had a tight connection for a flight to Albany.

- 10:50 - Fly from Detroit to Albany and arrive around 12:30.

As it turned out, his final connecting fight in Detroit was late, so the tight connection was not an issue. When they finally boarded, the passengers were told they needed to refuel, then they needed to have the plane de-iced. The passengers sat on the plane for 90 minutes at the gate before it pulled back.

My son’s plane finally touched down just before 2 a.m. - about 16 hours after he left San Antonio - at about the same time we were driving into the parking lot at the Albany Airport. It was perfect timing.

We went to the passenger exit to wait for our son. We waited, and waited and waited some more. At 2 a.m. the airport is a ghost town. When I peered over the security area down the hallway toward the B gates, I didn’t not see any passengers heading for the exits. Then my wife got a text from my son, “They can’t get the jetway to work.”

We decided to head up to the third floor observation desk to see what was going on. There was one other man waiting for his wife. He confirmed they were still trying to fix the jetway so the passengers could exit.

After 45 minutes or so, they finally gave up and decided to move the plane to a different gate. But to do that they needed to attached the plane to the golf-cart like vehicle that pushes it back from the jetway.

They could not get the vehicle to attach to the plane.

The man said his wife had been stuck in Detroit since the day before. He said that people on the plane were beginning to scream and curse.

The plane was one of those smaller commuter jets where the front exit can open into stairs. The man wondered why they just didn’t let people off that way. So did we. So did probably every person on that plane.

Out son texted: “I’m never getting home.”

Finally, they got the vehicle attached and began to back up the plane. They backed out pretty far in the runway, then stopped. It appeared they could not get the vehicle unattached from the plane.

It sat there for another 10 or 15 minutes.

At one point, one of the men working on the problem slipped on the tarmac.

Finally, the vehicle was freed from the grasp of the plane, the pilot revered up the jet engines sometime after 3 a.m. and headed toward the second gate. Another struggle ensued to get the jet bridge to the plane. We would not have been surprised if this one stuck too. It had been that kind of day, but they finally got one to work.

The man with the us in the observation room, said he saw people exiting the plane. He picked up the yellow roses he had brought and told us to have a good night.

Our son was one of the first off the plane. His long ordeal was over. I went to get the car and he went with his mother to get his luggage.

I paid the $3 for the short term parking and waited outside the luggage claim. I waited, and waited and waited some more.

They lost his luggage.

It was 3:30 a.m. when my son finally got in the car. I turned to him and told him that someday this would make a really great story. Just not today.

It had been over 18 hours since he left home in San Antonio. It takes about 30 hours to drive home.