Airline Horror Stories

With the holidays over, many of our friends are telling horror stories about delays they experienced with their air travel. It usually involves weather delays, flight cancellations and sometimes sleeping at airports. Always the fault of the airline.

I have such a story to tell. It took place during a holiday season a few years ago, and it’s particularly interesting because it involved three different flights and every one of them left exactly on time.

How could this happen?

We were off to visit my wife’s family in Mount Jackson, Pennsylvania — a small town half an hour’s drive north of Pittsburgh International Airport to celebrate the Fourth of July weekend.

Because we were at our East Hampton home for the summer and not in our Manhattan apartment, we decided that rather than fly out of Kennedy or LaGuardia, we’d fly out of Long Island McArthur Airport, the regional airport near at hand that had a once-a-day flight to Pittsburgh, but which left at 6:52 a.m. on the Friday of that weekend. That was fine with us. There’s a nice Marriott Hotel just adjacent to that airport. So we drove there Thursday afternoon, had a good dinner, watched a movie and went to bed early. As dawn was breaking, we arrived at our gate right on time only to find they had just closed the doors and were backing the aircraft out to the runway. It turned out that 6:52 a.m. was not the boarding time. It was the actual flight time. And they left right on time. And there it went. We watched it lift off right outside the window.

Shouting and pleading got us nowhere. Stating we’d been betrayed, told over the phone that 6:52 was the boarding time didn’t get us anywhere either. The plane would not be brought back. What to do? It was the only plane to Pittsburgh.

Within the hour, however, after everybody calmed down, an official with United Airlines — the carrier with whom we had booked the flight — said there was good news. If we wanted it, we could take a later flight to Pittsburgh leaving at 1:05 p.m. However, it was not an exactly perfect solution. It was leaving from LaGuardia, but there was space on it and if we took a one hour cab to LaGuardia, we’d arrive with plenty of time to make that flight. So we booked it.

After shopping for some things at LaGuardia, we realized they had one of those private clubs at the gate for the first class passengers. We bought first class. It was all they had. Now we could have an early first class lunch at this club, get on the plane and still get to Pittsburgh by 4. All just fine considering what we’d just been through.

There in that lounge we had a lovely early lunch of Perrier, ham and cheese on croissants, fois gras and crème brulè. Then, sitting in comfortable club chairs reading the London Times and drinking café au lait, we, um, missed some sort of announcement — they really should speak louder about these things — resulting in our missing that flight too.

At this point, a hostess in the lounge overheard us once again telling everyone, now at this club, about what had unfortunately happened beginning since the night before and she walked over and said she was taking over our situation.

“Just stay where you are here. I will find some other way to get you to Pittsburgh today, and when I do you will come with me and I will personally escort you to that plane and make sure they put you aboard it. Just don’t move.”

We gave her our boarding passes and drivers licenses and off she went. Half an hour later, she was back. She had not been able to book us to Pittsburgh, but as we’d told her our destination was Mt. Jackson, Pennsylvania, she looked it up and was able to find, leaving in an hour and 45 minutes, an aircraft from another airline here at LaGuardia that had a flight to Akron-Canton Airport in Ohio.

“Pittsburgh is half an hour to the south of Mt. Jackson,” she said. “The Akron-Canton Airport is west of Mt. Jackson approximately the same distance as from Pittsburgh. I transferred your Enterprise Rent-a-Car reservation to there. Now you will come with me.”

And so she “took us by the ear” as she said, using a phrase that usually refers to mothers telling their children something, and walked us to an airport bus — she joined us on it — took us to another terminal, then walked half mile to the other airline’s gate, put us into the boarding process, and stayed with us until she could see we had presented our boarding passes to the agent there and were headed toward the ramp that would lead us down the way to the door of the airplane.

She then smiled, offered up a slight curtsy, made a little wave, and strode off into the sunset. A job well done.

And yes, I wrote a letter to United about this wonderful woman. And furthermore, know that neither of us drink alcohol.

But there is a little more to this story. At the end of the weekend at Mt. Jackson, we booked a flight out of Akron-Canton that supposedly went, after making a stop in Philadelphia, back out to McArthur Airport where our car was parked.

However, when we made the stop at Philadelphia, we were told there was some small matter with a warning light in the cockpit that had to be attended to. We were promised it would all be fixed in half an hour. But the half hour came and went, then another hour, and then we had to get off the plane and into the Philadelphia terminal because they were going to bring out another aircraft.

After an hour of that, however, I, being the brains of our outfit, announced we were taking a taxi from the airport to the Philadelphia train station and taking a high speed 90-minute train ride to Penn Station in Manhattan. The trains leave every hour. Tickets are about $44 each. And at that point it would be dinner time.  We’d have dinner in a nice restaurant, sleep in the apartment and the next morning, somehow, we’d get ourselves out to Islip-McArthur, free up our car in the lot there and drive it home to East Hampton.

And, believe it or not, with no mistakes, we did that.

Read more of Dan Rattiner’s stories.