Worst air travel experience ever.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We had a layover in Toronto Tuesday night en route to Ville de Quebec, and because of some weather, we ended up unable to deplane, sitting on the tarmac for six freaking hours before we could get to the gate. (Yes, it actually took us longer to get from the runway to the airport than it did to fly cross-Canada.) It then took us several more hours to reschedule our connection to Quebec, arrange accomodations in Toronto, etc.

We had thought that we were being prudent by bringing three times as much formula formula for our baby in our carry-on luggage, but we actually ran out before the night was out, and of course there was nowhere open to get an emergency supply. Luckily we had cereal to fall back on, but still our normally-quiet baby screamed like I’ve never heard her scream before. We were able to sleep for only two hours before getting up to make our connection.

As an added bonus, they lost my bag, so I’ve had only the clothes on my back since I left Vancouver Tuesday morning.

Very crappy experience, all-in-all, but we did make it intact, and already I feel a lot less like dying. (Quebec City is beautiful.)

Please make me feel better about this experience by relating your comparable (or preferably worse air travel anecdotes.

2

Mine’s not quite that terrible.

Three hours before my flight was supposed to leave, I got a phone call that it was cancelled. Crap. Panicky panicky panicky rebooking on a flight that leaves sooner and routes me through Dulles, instead of a direct flight to O’Hare. So panicky panicky rush to the airport, rush to check in, check my bags and pray they’ll make it with me, fly through customs and security and make it onto the plane.

Which is promptly delayed. For two hours. Lovely. When we do eventually make it to Dulles, I still have an hour left of my layover, but not a shred of American money on me. So I eat my leftover slice of pizza, yum yum. When I get on the second leg, we make it out to the tarmac.

At which point they tell us there is a ground stop on all flights from the eastern seaboard. For three hours. So for three hours, I sit there in the last row of the plane, mercifully not being forced to share a row with anyone, curled up and next to weeping. I just want to see my family who I haven’t seen in six months! When the ground stop is lifted, we are delayed further as other planes take off first. And then the actual flight into O’Hare. And we make it there, finally, all in one piece, the plane pulls up to gate, and we are delayed FURTHER because there is no one to drive the jetway over. We are delayed another half hour. The guy in the row in front of me declares “Hey, if I jump onto the jetway, can I go?”

Estimated travel time: two hours
Actual travel time: fourteen hours
Arrival time in Chicago: 3:30 AM. My sainted dad picked me up at the airport.

The other worst flight I’ve ever had was a direct from Halifax to Toronto with exciting juddering turbulence for the entire two-hour flight. Even the flight attendants couldn’t get up and move around the plane. My friend and I spent the entire flight in the last row of the plane, clutching each other’s hands and trying to ignore the other people in the plane vomiting.

3

Wasn’t me but a friend of mine; Dug. His real name’s Doug but he’s always digging himself into a hole so we call him Dug. Dug’s a trip. Never known anyone like him. He’s kind of a mess really.

Dug was working on a seismic aquisition ship off the western coast of South America. He’d been out for about three months when he decided he’d had enough. They brought him back to pthe nearest port and he was to fly home from Lima, Peru. He was provided with a hotel room and money for dinner, a taxi to the airport and the departure tax.

Dug being Dug partied that night, his first off the boat in awhile and had just enough money left to get to the airport. He gave them his ticket, got his luggage loaded and they asked for $18 for the departure tax. Dug had spent it.

So he finds an ATM in the airport, inserts his card and then can’t remember his pin number. After 3 months on a boat he’d forgotton it. He tries a number and it doesn’t work. He does this two more times. Well, after three incorrect tries the ATM ate his card, wouldn’t give it back.

Dug goes back to the counter to explain, his ticket is paid and his luggage is on board but he can’t pay the tax. They take Dug’s luggage off the plane. Dug watches as the plane leaves without him. He’s stuck at the Lima airport with no money at all, broke.

Dug becomes friends with the beggars outside the airport. They were all sitting there asking for money together, so why not? Some new beggars ask Dug for money. Others laugh and say he has no money, don’t ask him.

After a coupe of days with nothing to drink or eat, some poor Peruvian soda vendor feels sorry for Dug and gives him an orange Fanta. Dug tells me later that he tried to drink it slow, that he wanted to make it last but that he was so thirsty that he started drinking it and couldn’t stop and he polished off the entire thing in one big, thirsty swig.

After 3 days, a taxi driver agrees to buy Dug’s watch. It’s a pretty nice watch, really. Does he get the hundreds it’s worth? No, he gets $18. Dug marches to the counter, pays the $18 tax and they put his hungry, thirsty, dirty ass on the next plane and 3 days late he arrives home.

Dug calls his sister, his friends, everyone for a ride home from the airport. It was a holiday. We were all gone. He’s stuck overnight on the curb because he still has no money for another night. Same concrete bed, different city. Dug… that boy’s an effin’ trip.

4

Wow, I have nothing to compare to these.

I think the worst was when I returned from Jacksonville to Boston with a change in Newark. There was some problem in Newark, so there was an hour delay just getting on the plane. We we finally got on, we sat on the tarmac for three hours waiting for fog in Boston to clear.

That’s annoying, but the worst of it was that my new girlfriend was going to pick me up at the airport. I had no way of calling her.

5

I had a couple. Flying back from Disney to Detroit. The turbulence was so bad you could not hold a cup of liquid without throwing it all over. When I walked to the can I had to grab every seat all the way to keep balance. The barf bags were all out. We dropped a couple times in pockets and landed with a thud. It was horrible.
Once i had a business flight to Oshawa Canada from Metro, Detroit. We taxied along the runway and the pilot announced there was a warning light on and he shut down. We waited a while and then he tried again. He aborted again. This went on for 3 hours before they took us off the plane. My meeting was shot.
Another time on a Lear Jet to Oshawa. We were coming into the airport and the pilot asked about conditions. They answered that it was slippery and a couple planes had slipped off the runway. But because we had a jet ,they were confident that we would be OK. More info than I needed.

6

Ruptured eardrum, cabin pressure. Excruciating.

7

I’ve had some interesting travel experiences but two stand out:

  1. I was in the air on 9-11 flying back from India via Hong Kong and San Francisco to Seattle. The attacks happened several hours before we were scheduled to land in San Francisco and there were only 2 small signs something was wrong. Since we were late leaving Hong Kong, I asked the flight attendant if I would make my connecting flight in SF, she put her hand over mind and told me not to worry about it. I also noticed that the little monitor that shows your plane on its route turned off.

We didn’t know anything at all until we landed. The guy sitting next to me said “hey, this isn’t San Francisco” - they had diverted us to Vancouver, BC. At that point, people got on phones, pilot made an announcement and turned the speakers to a radio station. We sat on the tarmac for about 2 hours, then they let us into the airport (after the most stringent security checkpoint I’ve ever been through).

It was madness. A lot of wide-bodied planes from Asia were being diverted to Vancouver. They wouldn’t give us our luggage or tell us when we would get our luggage. People crying, language barriers - just chaos. This was before the days of ubiquitous cell phones - I didn’t have one and there were people 10-15 deep at all the payphones.

I finally ended up at an Elephant & Castle pub. They had a red phonebooth - it wasn’t just decor, it was an actual payphone - no one in line. I managed to call my boyfriend, my boss, my parents. My boyfriend at the time had been frantic for awhile, I hadn’t communicated my itinerary to him, as far as he knew I was taking the other route through Amsterdam, I could have been flying East to West across the US at the time of the attacks.

Luckily, Vancouver is not far from Seattle. After confirming the borders were open (big thanks to some Canadian EQ-playing friends of ours) he drove to Vancouver and picked me up.

From India to Seattle, I was traveling for over 40+ hours. My luggage showed up 2 weeks later. A good friend of mine who also posts here got stuck on the East Coast and ended up driving cross country back to Seattle with one of our less pleasant coworkers - hell for him.

  1. My other story was less dramatic, but still pretty annoying. I went to San Antonio to visit my mom for Christmas, my boyfriend went to Kingman AZ to visit his family. I was supposed to fly home to San Diego on 12-31, he was going to drive from Kingman to San Diego on 1-1. My connecting flight was Phoenix, I picked it because it seemed a safe choice from nasty weather.

Left San Antonio, got to Phoenix for a 6:00 pm departure. Got on the plane, no problem. We sat and sat. They came on the intercom and said there was fog in San Diego and we couldn’t leave. More sitting. Finally, they let us off the plane and told us to stay at the gate for reboarding. At 11:00 pm, they canceled the flight. Due to the holidays, they couldn’t get me another flight home for two days. Act of god - no hotel room or rental car or any compensation, just “sorry.”

I rode the shuttle over to the rental car place, I thought I would get a car to drive home (about 6 hours) or drive to Kingman (about 3 hours) and ride home with my boyfriend. It was super expensive to rent a car, so that was out. I ended up getting a hotel room (we did get a discount voucher so the room was like 60 bucks) and my boyfriend drove from Kingman to Phoenix - he got there around 4 in the morning. We left Phoenix at 11 or so and drove 6 hours to get home. The airline credited me that leg of the flight, so the hotel room cost was a wash.

Annoying but not too bad.

Both times I got pretty lucky - diverted to Vancouver only a few hours from home, stuck in Phoenix with my boyfriend only 3 hours away.

8

Flight from US to Tokyo…they got over Russia and announced that the Russians revoked our permission to fly over them. I still don’t understand that.

BAck to Anchorage to refuel…then on to Tokyo. Total flight time: 19 hours. Some of it was on the ground in Anchorage but we were not allowed to leave the plane.

9

My worst was a trip from Raleigh, NC to Albany, NY for my grandmother’s funeral in the fall of 2001. We had a multi-hour layover in Newark and our bags did not make it to Albany with us. This was at about 9 pm and the baggage claim agent told us they could get our bag there at like 1 pm the next day. Mind you, you could drive the distance in about 3 hours. Anyway, I was able to borrow a suit from my dad and my wife hit a 6 am sale the next morning to attend the 10 am service.

We left bright and early on a 6 am flight the next morning. Again we connected through Newark and were on the runway for our final leg to Raleigh around 8 am when that plane crashed in Queens. Back to the gate we went. Eventually we were kicked out of the gate area into the ticketing and baggage areas where there was little seating for the thousands of people who were now stuck. Things were up in the air all day on whether there would be any flights taking off at all. Finally things started happening, but as an extra twist because we were on a code-share flight and we had to ride the train between terminals a couple times to straighten that out.

Finally we had tickets for a 5 pm flight. Then the crew was unsuprising late. Then we had to wait half an hour for “catering” to come by and stock the plane with soda. I was tempted to poll the passengers on whether anybody actually wanted to wait so they could get their freaking half-cup of refreshment for the whopping hour long flight we were facing but I thought it best to keep my mouth shut. Eventually we got home some 12 hours later than expected. Many have experienced worse, like the people on the plane that crashed that day, but that was my worst.

10

I’m flying back from San Diego to Chicago. I’m not flying to O’hare, but to the smaller one, Midway, or something like that. The flight I was on got canceled, but I manage to rebook on a later flight the same day. About halfway through the flight, we are informed we will be heading to Pittsburgh instead. When we get to Pittsburgh, we are informed that the airport hotel is full, and if we want an off airport hotel we were on our own, and the airport was pretty snowed in, so good luck getting there. We would however receive a $10 breakfast voucher, plus as many leftover cans of soda and airline peanuts we wanted.

I don’t know if you’ve ever stayed overnight at an airport, but they don’t turn off the announcements. Every 5 minutes it was “The moving walkway is now ending” “The mayor welcomes you to Pittsburgh” “The white zones are for loading and unloading only” and so on. It was hard to sleep.

When I arrived in Chicago the next morning, I found out why we went to Pittsburgh. A plane had tried to land in the Chicago airport I was going to, slipped on some ice, overran the runway, went through the fence, and into a busy intersection, killing about 6 drivers.

11

Flying from south Florida to Ireland for a funeral – The Call had come at 4:30 am on New Years Day, so we had to scramble to get a flight together. Via Continental, left from West Palm International, connected (in a major hurry, due to delays) in Newark, and flew into Dublin.

Sans luggage.

Said luggage contained all our funerary clothes, toothbrushes, etc. A day’s worth of phone calls located our luggage; it was, of course, in New Jersey still. The funeral was the next day, so we had go out shopping for black suits, ties, shoes, dresses, etc., all at the very last minute.

Continental was very good, though, and managed to get our bags to us the very next morning; the desk manager at Dublin Airport went out to retrieve them from the belly of the plane himself, and paid a taxi to bring them to us; they arrived 10 minutes before we were to walk out the door. In the end, I liked the trousers I had had to buy better than the pair I had brought with me!

12

Few tales are likely to top this one.

13

WOW. That truly was the worst ever. And what an ever-loving idiot that gate agent was…

14

Hey, I was stiuck on the tarmac in Toronto Tuesday as well, on a flight from Houston. Only 2 1/2 hours, though. OTOH, my connecting flight to St. John’s was four hours late departing, so I was fairly knackered on arrival at 0330 local time.

That was nowhere near the worst, though. That probably would have been in the mid-80’s, Paris-Luanda on TAAG Angolan, on board a crappy, cockroach-ridden old DC-8 with no meal service for the scheduled 10-hour flight. Except it turned into an 20-hour flight when a mechanical fault forced us to divert to Lisbon after we were nearly halfway to our destination. Supposedly that was the only place where they could get credit for later payment on the repairs. And then, of course, once we got to our destination, we were in freakin’ Luanda.

15

This may be an urban legend, but a couple of decades ago an acquaintance of mine claimed he was flying London-Sydney with a stop-over in Kabul.
As they made final approach to Kabul, the pilot announced “there might be a delay”.
It turned out the Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan and captured Kabul airport. :eek:
(Luckily they passengers were only interned for a week.)

Then there was my mate who was flying the Russian airline Aeroflot (not the best carrier) when there was an announcement in Russian.
And all the native Russians started screaming. :smack:
(It turned out to be just severe turbulence…)

16

A long time ago (heck, the airline was PanAm!) we were supposed to fly from N.Y. to Frankfurt (Germany). About half way there, there were problems and one of the engines had to be shut down. The pilot decided to turn back and land at Gander, Newfoundland. Even though it was June, it was quite chilly and they gave us blankets as we walked across the tarmac to the terminal.

I was a kid, but I remember that the terminal at Gander is not very big, and there were two military transports full of soldiers waiting in the terminal, along with about 350 passengers of the PanAm 747. It was really crowded. I remember I spent a lot of time (and a lot of quarters) playing Pong (yes, it was that long ago).

They ended up flying in a replacement engine (mounted on a different 747). That was the first and only time I have ever seen a 747 with five engines. The engine was succesfully mounted on our plane, and we ended up arriving in Frankfurt in the middle of the night with only a 14 hour delay.

17

Grand Canyon Airlines. Yes, it’s a one hour sightseeing trip. I threw up everything but my toenails from the turbulence and spent the entire flight wishing the damn plane would crash just so the flight would be over.

As far as commercial flights…we go to Las Vegas once a year for a major Taekwondo tournament and to get in some advanced training. The one and only time we have ever booked on Priceline, they routed us Houston-Denver-Las Vegas. We landed in Denver, it started to snow and the airport shut down. We were supposed to get into Las Vegas about 1500 and the first seminar started at 1700. We arrived at 0400 with the remainder of the seminar starting at 0900. And they lost our luggage.

18

This is a repost from another thread, but this was my worst traveling experience:

After several weeks in India I was flying back home. Exhausted, I hadn’t been feeling well for the last day. On the flight, I was feeling light headed and went to the lavatory. As I bent over the sink to splash water on my face I grew very lightheaded and passed out. When I woke up, I was crumpled up in the floor. I had vomited down the front of my shirt, peed myself and soiled my pants. To add insult to injury, I had several wet spots on my back from the floor and a few pieces of toilet paper hanging off me.

I was 1 hour into a 9 hour flight with a seat in the middle of not only a large row, but in the middle of a large block of seats full of people.

R

19

I can say I’ve never had a bad experience. I used to work for a company and we found discounted hotel rooms for people standed at airports, whether they or the airline pays. So I’ve heard a lot of horror first hand.

<Knock Wood> My flight experience have been good.

My favourite quote I overheard was from a gate agent named Carol who worked for Northwest Airlines. She was getting rooms from me (we were talking on the phone, I was in the call center near O’Hare) and I overheard this guy yelling at her that his flight was late. Carol said, that the flight wasn’t cancelled yet, but they had to check the plane over.

The guy kept yelling how improtant he is and she had enough and I heard her say

“Do you want to be LATE Mr Smith or do you want to be THE late Mr Smith.”

:slight_smile:

20

My wife and I were going to see my family in Louisiana for Christmas. We were scheduled to leave Boston on the afternoon of December 22nd going into Monroe, LA when a major snowstorm approached Boston Logan and it was just about to close.

When we got to the ticket agent, she told me our flight had just been canceled. I begged her to send us somewhere, anywhere just to get away from the storm which might jeopardize the entire trip. She told me she might be able to do that but almost all remaining flights were full and she wasn’t allowed to suggest one and told me to start naming airports. After about 10 tries, I suggested Chicago and she found us two seats and we were off before the airport closed but the agent told me that we were on our own after that. Chicago had no seats available on any flight I suggested so they put us in a far suburban hotel for the night with a bunch of other people.

Repeat this process for two more days. Atlanta - Dallas - Memphis, TN - Monroe, LA. They had to switch us over to Northwest Airlines in Memphis. We arrived in Monroe late on Christmas Eve and of course our bags were lost after all that. We still had our original clothes on and no presents. They finally found them and delivered them by courier Christmas night.

I didn’t blame the airlines up until that point but the switchover to Northwest made them issue paper tickets and I didn’t know what they were for. It also cancelled our tickets for the return flight home and nobody would do anything about it at the airport. My mother had to use her frequent flyer miles to get us home otherwise we would have had to pay about $2000 in full coach fares.