This year, heading home from Philadelphia to Denver for the holidays an adventure. A family friend offered up some, “buddy passes,” passes given by airlines to employees which they are then permitted to pass on to their friends that permit them to fly as the lowest-priority standby passengers on any flight for about $50 a segment. I could have purchased a roundtrip ticket home for around $350, but the prospect of two direct flights and the chance to save about $250 struck me as a bargain I couldn’t refuse. Yes, there was some element of risk, but I had an extra 24 hours to get into Denver before I had any appointments, there were three direct flights a day, and worst comes to worse, I could connect via Chicago, so I opted to forgo a real ticket (that my father actually offered to cover but I figured they do enough to support me already) for a booking on buddy passes.
On Wednesday, as I set out to leave, the plane is booked solid but the gate agent walks me down the jetway and onto the plane; one passenger with a boarding pass hasn’t made it to the gate in time and will be left behind and I can have her seat. Perfect. As we approach the runway, a flight attendant notices that there’s a single exit light that won’t turn off. Fuck it, I say, I’m willing to fly like that. Seems good enough to me, but not for the pilots. We turn around and sit at the gate for two hours. They turn the plane off and on repeatedly and it won’t fix itself. Another two hours go by and maintenance cannot fix the plane. The flight gets cancelled. 120 revenue passengers just missed their flight to Denver. Where the hell does that leave me? I race to call my family friend on the phone and he manages to book me onto a flight to Chicago. I know I might have to wait for a couple of flights in Chicago, but it seems like a sure thing. The airline has over a dozen flights a day between Denver and Chicago on everything from A-319’s to 747’s and 777’s. I’ll make it to Denver that night.
I arrive in Chicago just as the last Denver flight is about to depart, but it’s full. Two standby passengers, both of them are revenue. Damnit. I call the family friend and he picks me up at the airport (fortunately he happens to live in Chicago as well) and takes me to his house for a shower, dinner, and a few hours of sleep. I show up at the airport the next morning at 4:00 AM to try to catch the earliest flight. It’s full, with revenue standbys. The 6:00 AM flight, full, with even more standbys. Every hour until 11:00 AM a flight leaves for Denver. I course back and forth between concourses from gate to gate to show up a half an hour before each flight leaves and wait nervously right next to the gate agents to see if I can get on. By 12:00 they’re down to just one or two heartbreaking spots keeping me from getting home. Seeing a 777 leave the gate and knowing that if it had just two more seats somewhere in the vast ocean of seats and I could be back to family, friends, and a bed is frustrating.
And then a flight to Colorado Springs gets cancelled. People rebook onto Denver flights or list as standbys. Direct flights get cancelled and people that never intended to come through Chicago show up in Chicago. The standby list grows. For most revenue passengers, they wait for one flight, half get on that flight, half are sent to the next flight, and the lists continue to grow, but every two to three hours they manage to turn everyone over. Except, of course for the non-revenue passengers, those idiots flying on buddy passes.
I don’t mean to be overly dramatic. Certainly others, even on this board, have had worse travel experiences than this. Waiting in Chicago-O’Hare is not a fate worse than death, in fact it’s not a fate worth than any number of common experiences. But it was truthfully probably one of the most stressful, frustrating, and hopeless 18 hours of my life. I didn’t know how it was going to end. I reminded myself, “certainly, actually dying here waiting for planes is unlikely,” but I had no idea how in the hell I was supposed to be getting out of Chicago. And every hour there was some reason to hold hope. And every hour there was reason to have hopes crushed. By 6:00 PM the standby list for a 737 had grown to 125 passengers, nearly all of them revenue. That’s the size of the plane itself. A large, stampeding mass of angry people that became like a wave of people that would rush from gate to gate thinking that perhaps somehow arriving earlier to the gate would improve their standing on a standby list automatically generated by computers.
Every couple of hours I would solemnly mope up to an unoccupied gate agent or customer service agent. In a meek and sympathetic voice, “hi, I’m on a buddy-pass, and I know I’m not supposed to talk to you (you’re non-revenue and you aren’t supposed to be wasting anyone’s time, these are part of the rules of the buddy-passes; before departing I was harshly reminded, “if you forget or don’t have your confirmation number when you show up to ticketing, there’s nothing anyone can do for you, the ticketing agents will ignore you”) but is there any chance of being able to get to Denver any time in the near future?” I’m breaking the rules, but the employees are sympathetic. You’re somehow connected to an employee, and in some sort of primate, look out for your friends’ friends manner, they care. They punch a few keystrokes to show concern and slowly respond, “every flight has been overbooked between now and Christmas eve. All of them by a lot. I can’t predict the future, but it doesn’t look good.” I hear this phrase, “doesn’t look good,” over and over again. It’s rattles around your head. When you sit down to sulk on the benches and feel sorry for yourself, it’s that flashbulb memory that won’t stop playing itself over and over again, like watching Kennedy getting shot or the steps leading up to smacking your chin open on the roadway. “I don’t want to be mean or make comments about things that can’t be changed, but I would never let my family use buddy-passes this time of the year.” Translation: you’re fucked.
Creativity is, and has been, exercised. A car: $800 with one-way fee. Trains tickets: sold out. Buses: sold out. Flying home to Philadelphia to spend the break alone in an empty house is an attractive option, but the flights back to Philadelphia are also overbooked with a healthy stock of standbys.
And then the Christmas Miracle happens. A couple flying non-revenue that I’ve gotten to know over the day comes up to me. The woman is in tears and the man is smiling awkwardly. Some defense contractor that won’t give anything more than his first name has overheard them and pulled five $100 bills out of his wallet and said, “if you want to get home and need to get a car, would you do it if money weren’t an obstacle?” “I can do this, even if I may not look like it (he didn’t), and I want to do this. Merry Christmas.” They’re going to get a car and drive to Denver and I can ride with them if I like. And just as we are about to leave the airport, the man insists on talking to one more gate agent. Some flight into Chicago was cancelled, there’s a plane leaving for Lincoln, Nebraska in 20 minutes that should have two seats available. It’s against the rules, but the agent agrees to touch the bookings and put us on the flight. Another person doesn’t show, and all three of us get onto the flight to Lincoln. From there it’s a mere $160 one way rental for a Prius to get us to Denver. On the way out of Lincoln we stop at the Wal-Mart at 2:30 in the morning and splurge on every food, healthy and fatty alike, that we’ve been craving for the past 44 hours. And all of the creature comforts it’s impossible to find in an airport but available in that bustling late-night bazaar (it was indeed shockingly crowded for the time, families buying Christmas toys and college kids taking advantage of Nebraska’s liquor laws that permit Wal-Mart to sell all varieties of liquor alike). The woman buys a $4 set of bath slippers, band aids, Neosporin, and cotton balls to change her bleeding, oozing feet out of the three-inch heels that have virtually hobbled her over the past two days. 54 hours after leaving my house in Philadelphia, I’ve arrived at my mom’s house in Denver.
I’m exhausted and stunned for days. I procrastinate even worse than normal, 15-30 minutes late to every long awaited rendezvous with friends because I just sat at my desk playing round after round of computer solitaire for hours. I try to sleep, but it feels like my kidneys are still pumping out wave after wave of adrenalin. It still feels like I’m in the airport. I swear to every family member and friend I speak with, “I will never, ever do that again.” When I leave the room I expect the doorway will lead to a concourse in Chicago-O’Hare. It takes me a week to feel normal again. And on the flight back, I never stop clenching the arm-rest until I think we’re beyond the point where we’d divert back to Denver if there was a mechanical problem. And as I pass over what I think looks like Chicago I want to scream out, “just keep flying the fucking plane and don’t land for anything! Nothing!” But I figure they land planes for disturbances like that nowadays so I keep my mouth shut.
But come on, the flight back was half-empty and I got to ride across the country in first class for $40. You can’t beat that, can you? In what other set of circumstances would I ever have had cause to visit the Lincoln, NA Wal-Mart at 2:30? Plus there’s a direct flight from Washington DC to Brussels. Spring break watching some bike racing, anyone?
Prior to this I’ve never understood how people could ruin their live playing scratch-off lottery tickets, but now? I think I get it.