Jolt Country

"Please tell us about your experience." - Frontier Airlines email.

Alrighty. Got to McCarran Intl. at about 8 AM on Friday, in plenty of time for my 9:55 AM flight back to Nashville. Oh boy, going home! Finally!

9 AM comes, and we get the notice, the flight's been delayed until 10:28. Eh, okay. Strange, the flight out was delayed 30 minutes as well, but once being a fairly regular business traveler, you get to know that these things happen. Big deal.

The plane finally arrives, and the passengers get off. They don't start lining us up to get on yet. The guy at the gate announces that there'll be a little more delay due to some maintenance they had to do on the brakes. Well, okay, the plane probably needs to stop at the end of the flight, so sure, check them brakes!

At around 10:30, I get an email from Frontier saying that it's now been delayed until 11:45. Huh, I guess those brakes needed more work than they thought!

The clock starts inching toward 11:45, and then I get another "travel alert!" email on my phone, saying it's now delayed until 12:15.

The "travel alert" emails themselves tell most of the story, so here, in order, are all of the emails with the updated departure times:

10:28 AM
11:45 AM
12:15 PM
1:00 PM
2:00 PM
3:00 PM

Somewhere in there, they were kind enough to line us all up to give us a $10 lunch voucher, which was honored by none of the three places I went.

2:30 PM comes around, though, and we finally board. Then the announcement that they're still not quite finished with those brakes! Just be another few minutes, thanks for our patience!

Another long wait, and then "Okay, the brakes are finished, but now we've delayed so long, we need to change pilots." It's almost comical at this point, but we had no idea how comical it was about to get.

So, after a total of an hour just sitting there in the plane, at the gate, we get a new pilot, who fires up the engines, and we're off! Well, we're taxiing. And taxiing. And taxiing. Man, I didn't know McCarran was this big! Where's the runway already!

And then, we hear this, and as Dave Barry used to say, I swear I am not making this up:

"Just a little announcement, we're taxiing back to the gate because one of the passengers has decided they don't want to take the flight, so we have to take them back."

At this point the plane is now over 5 hours and 30 minutes late getting started, and just as we finally arrived at the runway, that's the point when someone decided, ehh, forget it, I'm good.

Astonished, bewildered gasps and maniacal giggles washed over the passengers. Booing and hooting and hollering. Calls for the passenger to "make the walk of shame, like in Game of Thrones".

We make it back to the gate, and they run through all the same checklists that you're used to hearing at the end of the flight, but this one hadn't started yet.

The couple causing all of this walked slowly, meekly to the front amid shouts of "get off the damn plane already!!" After they leave, the Captain comes out, looks down the hallway and jokes, "anyone else?!" Haahahaha, we all laugh.

Five minutes later, three more people get up and say, hey, you know, not a bad idea. This is now five (5) people total who have left a flight that they waited 5.5 hours extra for.

And oh, remember, they can't just leave, they have to hold up the plane so that their luggage can be retrieved.

Pretty smooth sailing after that, and at 4:15 PM, a mere six hours and 20 minutes after the original departure time, we lifted off to sarcastic, celebratory cheers from the crowd, and off we went.

(The voucher was not honored on the plane, either.)

The people who got up really should have had to explain themselves. What a shitshow. There are direct flights to EVERYWHERE in Vegas.

The only time I have ever gotten up from a flight, if I remember correctly, was the last time I was trying to get home to Denver during Christmastime. It was the same sort of deal that you had, where every hour they would tell us about how it was delayed another hour.

I think I got off because -- after sitting on the plane for an hour and not moving -- we got notification that there was an indefinite delay. There had already been cancellations and such, so I was faced with the situation of waiting indefinitely for a flight that was going to go south (not west) and take me to Dulles, where I would have missed the connecting flight to Denver.

I got off the plane and by the time that I did so, so much time had passed that new flights opened up straight to Denver and I went ahead and did that.

Here is the explanation that was murmuring through the plane regarding the two who made us go back to let them off.

1. While the plane was sitting there, it made lots of strange noises. (Airplane noises, but people who don't fly much might find them strange.)

2. When they finally fired up the engines, that recognizable smell of airgas fumes (or whatever it is) went through the cabin. If you fly a lot, you're like, yeah, but people who don't fly much might find it strange.

3. Add to this a five+ hour "maintenance" delay, and the going theory was that all of these "problems" (none of which were actual problems) caused them to think that the flight was doomed and they had to get off right away or they were gonna die.

I buy this explanation, and if you buy this explanation, it's hard not to imagine the couple actively rooting for the plane to crash.

I imagined that, so when we landed, I gave a (second) silent, internal fuck you to those losers.

Morons. Morons!

(Now, the three that got up after, if I didn't have a family to get back to, and I had any money or freedom or will to live left, I would definitely have joined them. Fuck it, one more night in Vegas. So those guys, I'm not angry at, just jealous.)

pinback wrote:Here is the explanation that was murmuring through the plane regarding the two who made us go back to let them off.

1. While the plane was sitting there, it made lots of strange noises. (Airplane noises, but people who don't fly much might find them strange.)

2. When they finally fired up the engines, that recognizable smell of airgas fumes (or whatever it is) went through the cabin. If you fly a lot, you're like, yeah, but people who don't fly much might find it strange.

3. Add to this a five+ hour "maintenance" delay, and the going theory was that all of these "problems" (none of which were actual problems) caused them to think that the flight was doomed and they had to get off right away or they were gonna die.

4. The people who got off were in rows 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.

(It was a really long plane.)

Flack wrote: The people who got off were in rows 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.

(It was a really long plane.)

It was a really long plane and at the end you realized the pilots never knew where they were flying and the entire trip was an enormous waste of everyone's time.

pinback wrote:Somewhere in there, they were kind enough to line us all up to give us a $10 lunch voucher, which was honored by none of the three places I went.

What kind of shit is that?

pinback wrote:The couple causing all of this walked slowly, meekly to the front amid shouts of "get off the damn plane already!!" After they leave, the Captain comes out, looks down the hallway and jokes, "anyone else?!" Haahahaha, we all laugh.

Hahaha classic! Sensational!

Hey Pinner, I know your delayed flight sucked but were you happy because of the content it provided? Just a tiny bit happy because you could retell the story to all of us?



THE
BAD NEWS TRAVELS
FASTER THAN LIGHT
AARDVARK

Yeah, I'm not coming at this like OMG MY WHOLE LIFE WAS RUINED EVERYONE FEEL BAD FOR ME!!

I would have rather not been stuck at the airport an extra six hours, but of course, it's a good story-- well, it's a story, and I was happy to tell it.