January 31, 2002

Here I am about 32,000 feet above sea-level according to the last announcement from the captain and it is after 9 o’clock at night EST though I am definitely not on the eastern time zone by now … I thought I’d write some of this down for publishing later since I probably will never do it otherwise :p It’s been a couple of eventful (and sometimes frustrating <g>) days. I came over to Detroit last night since they were predicting sever thunderstorms in Detroit last night and since I would have had more than an hours drive to get to the airport in the morning today (and wasn’t really sure what the road conditions would be …) I decided to get into town early. I did get in with the snow but at first it was like census night in Bethlehem – every motel I went to, there were no rooms vacant 🙂 Finally found a place and it was cheaper than some of the places I’d first gone to too – go figure …

Got up in the morning today and the snow storm really was here (and there I was hoping that the weathermen would be wrong once again, darn!). I was half afraid that the flight would be canceled but surprisingly, the automated system said that the flight was still on time. I got ready and left for the airport and found to my surprise that I’d been staying less than five minute’s drive from the airport. The queues were long to check in and it took me over an hour and a half to get checked in but the rest was easy enough. I had been half afraid that I’d get pulled up since my luggage contained an XBOX and a DreamCast and I thought that for sure they would run the luggage through the X-Rays and would think it was a bomb of some kind :p Fortunately, that didn’t happen since they never ran my luggage through the X-Rays at all. I did have a little trouble getting through the security check-point but that might have been because I was wearing the holster for my Pocket PC <vbg>

So I got in with about an hour to spare and they even started boarding the flight with minimal delays – a half an hour to get the food in – but the trouble started once we were all in and ready to take off. First, they delayed the flight so that some people from connecting flights could get there, then they said that they had to de-ice the plane and then they said that they had some problem with the power from the airport and that they had to re-route the power. All this took about three hours and then they said they were ready and then they said, “oh no wait … we aren’t!” :p This time it turned out that they were getting some error messages on the onboard computers and had to have the techs come take a look at it. That turned into a good two hours as they had to either replace a computer or track down a faulty circuit – not sure which. Then they were ready to leave but it turned out that they didn’t have two starter trucks since this was a big plane and they needed two – two of the three starter trucks they’d got so far had broken down! Finally they got a starter truck but we’d been sitting on the ground close to six hours by then and the crew’s legal flying/in flight time limit was being reached and they weren’t sure that they could legally fly – so they had to check with the authorities to make sure that they could fly. I was getting pretty pissed off and apprehensive too by this time since I was beginning to think that the flight would be canceled and that I might have to spend another night in Detroit. However, they did get the permission to fly and we took off almost six hours to the minute from the time we were originally scheduled to take off.

My connecting flight from Tokyo to Singapore is shot to hell and gone by this time since there was only a two hour window between the original time we were supposed to land and the time the connecting flight was supposed to take off. I do have about sixteen hours in Singapore though and am hoping that they’ll make some arrangements in Tokyo so that I can still get to Singapore in time. But at this time, I have no idea what will happen … stay tuned :p

Tags: General
Posted by Fahim at 9:22 pm   Comments (0)

No Responses to

Subscribe to comments with RSS

There are no comments yet... Get the ball rolling by filling out the form below.

Leave a response

:mrgreen: :neutral: :twisted: :shock: :smile: :???: :cool: :evil: :grin: :oops: :razz: :roll: :wink: :cry: :eek: :lol: :mad: :sad: