Worst air travel experience ever.

[aruvqan]

@glee

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.)

My cousin and his girlfriend decided to visit Haiti in time for some rioting … seems someone tried invading in 1969 and the Tonton Macoute decided to arrest any suspicious looking people including my cousin Jamie … who just managed to skitter over the border into the Dominican Republic without luggage, money … just the clothing on their backs and their passports. The money went to pay for the ride.

[Sunspace]

@gonzomax

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.

Ah, you’ve flown Skycrash, er, I mean, “Skycraft” too? This is the airline (“Your non-IATA carrier”–and isn’t that a comfort to read on the tickets) that operated out of Oshawa, mostly taking GM people to Detroit. I flew it in '89 when I was spending a couple of months at the Farmington Hills headquarters of the company I worked for in Oshawa.

I think I’ve been on that Learjet as well. Totally cool, by the way; it was dusk and we flew past Toronto to the south through puffy clouds that were lit from below by the city. The plane sat six passengers and there was no door to the pilots’ area, so above a dashboard full of dials and glowing orange numbers, I could see out the front window. It was beautiful.

But to return to the theme of the thread, one time Oshawa was iced in, and we were almost there, and they diverted us back to London. Usually Skycraft laid on a larger plane than a LearJet for their flights to Windsor (it was about the size of a GO bus and seated about that many people), and I guess it couldn’t land at Oshawa in the conditions there. We disembarked in London, waited in the terminal there for a while, then reembarked, and took off again. I seem to recall that we still couldn’t land in Oshawa, so we landed on the north side of the field at Pearson in Toronto and disembarked at the executive terminal, and they they sent us to Oshawa by limo, but that might have been another trip.