Tuesday, October 25, 2005
News Nerd Blogs From Work, Part One
MIAMI -- A United Airlines pilot was removed from the cockpit and questioned by police after security screeners at Miami International Airport reported smelling alcohol, police said.
Later in the same story…
The flight had been scheduled to leave at 9 a.m. with 76 passengers. According to United's Web site, it took of at 3:40 p.m. after a crew change.
Okay. So let’s say I’m one of the 76 passengers on this flight.
9 AM to 3:40 PM…that’s nearly a seven-hour wait. I can think of a lot of things that I could accomplish in seven hours. I could do ALL my laundry; I could vacuum my house top to bottom; I could blog my fool head off, generating pointless ranting about almost any topic known to man. I could bake bread in seven hours and have time to stir up some garlic butter for it, to go with the pot of spaghetti I could ALSO whip up in seven hours.
That’s a lot of time, is my point. And I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather NOT spend it than at the airport.
But the story doesn’t say anything about how the passengers were compensated. It’s not possible, is it, that United management just decided that being given the courtesy of an unimpaired pilot was compensation enough??
Anyway. If I was a passenger in this story, I’d be howling like a Tasmanian Devil right about now.
(oh, and Pisser? OOKLABOOCHA!)
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On the trip back to SF from MN last year at Xmas, our pilot hit a "panic" button on the control panel by mistake. And while he explained the mistake before landing, it activated the Homeland Security rigamarole.
ReplyDeleteSo our flight got diverted to an unused part of the tarmac and we were borded by airport and airline officials and SFPD.
We sat in the powered down jet for over an hour just getting it straightened out. The passengers were then released, but there was a return flight full of people who were going to be delayed further while the entire flight crew was interviewed.
See, that would be an "Off-With-His-Head" offense, in Gladystopia.
ReplyDelete(tzehwdbs: the specific variety of goosebumps caused by discovering a crawling insect in the tub just as you step into the shower. That millipede really gave me a bad case of the tzehwdbs.)