GogLobster

Me too!

jlisi984

An hour and nothing new? I'm getting worried here...

eightblack

Had someone told me that when I arrived at the EK lounge around 7.30am Monday morning - that I would not leave the place for 48 whole hours, I would have laughed in their face. Or cried. Or maybe both.

I wasn't quite sure what to do first. Shower. Eat. Or Drink.

It was like trying to decide which of your children to save first - when they both run in opposite directions in a park when they are toddlers.

I thought I could at least do 2 out of the 3. So I headed for the bar. I needed to calm my nerves. The staff were watching rather curiously as I grabbed the ice bucket, poured the entire bottle of Absolut into it, topped the rest up with tomato juice, threw the whole bottle of tobasco in along with 15 lemons and a cup of worcestershire sauce.

Ok, I may be slightly exaggerating here. It wasn't 15 lemons at all. More like 10. Whatever.

I clutched the cauldron of Bloody Mary mix like it was a life-support machine. Which it was. I then headed to grab something to eat. I was like the Klump family in the Nutty Professor movie. I ate everything in sight.

When I drained the Bloody Mary, I had a beer. And then a half a bottle of Chablis. Apparently, hydration is very important after an ordeal such as mine. And at my age, you cant be too careful.

The lack of sleep, the adrenalin, and now the food and alcohol started to take it's toll. I needed to have a lie down. But I thought I should have a good wash before someone told me to leave.

About the only intelligent thing I had managed to achieve on this trip was to not check luggage. So I had plenty of clothes with me. I headed for the shower and there I stayed until someone knocked on the door to enquire about my safety.

When I emerged, I felt like a new pin. I decided I should plug into the universe, so I fired up my laptop. But what was far more interesting to watch was the events unfolding outside.

Someone told me in the lounge that JFK is actually controlled by the unions and the mafia. Now, I'm not sure if that's true, but if it is - I don't think enough money changed hands. Or was changing hands.

For one, most of the activity on Monday was centered around getting the main runways clear. Given that JFK has 4 of them, this was no mean feat. We kept hearing that the airport was going to open at 6pm. The outside temp was hovering around 18-20 degrees. And by best guesstimates, somewhere between 18-30 inches of snow had fallen in the last 24-hours. The most snowfall in the last 60-years according to a wise person on TV.

Then there was the wind. Which only compounds things. And wind is the greatest enemy of a snow plow operator.

External contractors were called in from everywhere. Guys who used to mow lawns during the summer, were fitting snow plows to their trucks and simply rolling up to JFK and were being told to just start plowing. I think one guy even showed up on his ride-on John Deere, with the offer to help plow anything. For free. He said he just wanted to get away from his wife.

Or something like that.

When you understand the problem, it became clear that this mess wasn't going to be resolved anytime soon. For one, it wasn't simply about clearing snow and moving frozen aircraft. Airlines depend on crew. And the crews were spread everywhere. The other issue EK had working against it was an issue of cascading proportions. Flights kept arriving. Crews were well over their legal operating times. And JFK was simply not geared up to handle such a mess.

EK is only staffed and geared to handle 2 flights a day. Now it had 4. And more flights coming. The staff were already growing weary. If they only knew what was ahead of them.

One of the guys I met in the lounge early on was a retired Delta pilot. He's a great guy. I wont mention his name here - but he knows who he is. He now works for EK as a 777 pilot and spends his time between DXB and JFK. He was actually on a full revenue ticket, because that's the only way he could guarantee a seat at this time of the year.

It was good to hear his point of view on the whole saga. And it was comforting to know that he had actually been in the lounge longer than me. He had arrived Sunday morning. So he had already done 24-hours. In fact there were about 5 other people in the same boat. They hadn't left the lounge from the night before.

We bonded quickly. People were eager to share what they had already been through. It was like the Stockholm Syndrome. Except we weren't kidnapped.

As the day wore on, the lounge started to fill. You had the premium passengers from the 2 flights the day before and then the passengers for the 2 flights today (Monday).

Some, in their wisdom, had already decided to go home. Some stayed.

4pm came and went. Our departure was now out to 6pm. And then 11pm. When I checked in, I was booked in coach. I was fairly confident of an op-up, due to the overselling of the Y cabin, but because I had checked in at 7am that morning, the people controlling the flight were still unsure as to the final load, which aircraft was going to operate and if they were going to be able to operate at all.

I'd left both boarding passes at reception - as I politely asked the man on reception to help me with my connecting flight to Singapore. He said "leave it with me".

I went back in the afternoon and thankfully, was handed a J-class boarding pass for the JFK to DXB leg. Most excellent. I stopped worrying about my connection in DXB and told myself I would deal with that later. I decided to have a bottle of champagne to celebrate my good fortune.

There was no shortage of people in the lounge who wouldn't share a drink with you. After all, we were all in the same boat. And no-one knew for sure when we were going to get out of this thing. And whether or not we would make it out alive. People would simply sit down and chat, and then move on, eat something, check a few emails, read a book and in some instances, try and chat up a member of the opposite sex.

Or maybe that was just me. I forget.

Anyway.

The purser on my flight just happened to be a fellow FT'er. He'd sent me a couple of emails during the day - letting me know when they were going to go "operational", which at the last count was 1.30pm.

By the time 11pm comes around, we are thankful to be boarding.

The challenge that the airport staff had been grappling with for most of the day was the Etihad aircraft on "our" gate. The gate which EK uses to load the 380. The problem with the Etihad machine was that it was well and truly stuck. Frozen brakes, along with a inordinate amount of snow. On top of that, they also had the issue of trying to get traction for the tug (ie the machine that pushes the aircraft off the gate). In sheer desperation, the enterprising young mafioso even fitted the tug with snow chains to the rear wheels.

There was a lot of swearing, belting things with large hammers and once, a fight broke out between 2 snow plow operators. Apparently, plowing someone else's patch is akin to sleeping with their wife. Sadly the fight didn't last long, as a group of the guys in the lounge had already started taking bets on who would win.

Finally though, this beehive of activity managed to achieve what looked impossible and the collective efforts shifted the Etihad machine out of the way. I think the ground staff were so fed up with this "other airbus" that they pushed it into the Hudson.

Even though I was still tired, I was somewhat excited as this was my first ride in EK's A380. I'd been in SQ's big bird before but not EK's.

We all settle in and El Kapitan comes over the PA, telling us that we just need to "de-ice", load the final pieces of luggage into the hold and we'd soon be on our way to DXB.

Liar.

Firstly, when the EK pilots came to prepare the plane for de-icing and started pushing buttons in the cockpit, apparently they couldn't get some sort of valve closed. It was so cold, it was frozen open. Bloody french.

So they had to call a member of the mafioso who wasn't already burying a body. Or fighting with someone. A new part was ordered. And then we would be on our way. Except we weren't.

By this time, there were some very exhausted people. So EK decided to feed everyone and let people sleep. At this stage, we had been onboard for 3+ hours. No go.

One guy fell asleep as soon as he got on, and when he awoke 4-hours later, looked out the window and enquired "where are we?"
"New York" came the reply
He was outraged.

He was sure that we had already taken off and had been airborne. A crew member had to convince him that we were well and truly, still on terra firma. Inna New Yorka.

At the 7-hour mark, the Captain came over the PA for the umpteenth time and said that this was all too hard, and that he and the rest of the crew were all going to go home for a lie down. EK had pulled the pin on the flight and it was now officially cancelled.

Some of the cabin crew were in tears. As were most of the passengers. And the crew were way past their legal operating limit.

The only challenge now was getting back into the terminal. And this is where things clearly started to go pear-shaped. Well and truly.

It was now, definitely starting to get interesting...

kevincrumbs

Fantastic stuff. I mean, for us to read about and not actually have to live through.

janehoya

Me three! This is the best trip report of all-time! I think you should try and get it published.

lols

i am trying my best .... but i cannot stop laughing !

my finance is wondering what the hell is going on ! (shes trying to sleep)

pepe ! viva le pepe !

kudos to you sir !

looking fwd to the next part !


e.d.

Must...Fly!

This report is absolutely incredible!

From aussie to aussie I hope your return journey isn't as crazy!!

Paint Horse

Your wife is correct.

eightblack

Even though this saga has only just finished, I already miss my fellow travellers. Some of us were even half joking that we should have a re-union in 12-months time. I probably would attend. Maybe, we might even start a support group

For those of you who haven't travelled on EK before, especially from JFK to DXB, you need to understand the mix of passengers EK typically has on board.

On our flight, and really, across the board of all the flights during our time in the lounge, the mix was made up of Emiratis obviously, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, the odd American, a couple of English, definitely only one Aussie and a drunk Canadian who was convinced that his EK flight was flying direct to Toronto. Except that it wasn't. We tried to tell him more than once that all the flights out of JFK only went to Dubai. But he wouldn't have a bar of it.

So we just left him alone.

There were also a couple of other nationalities which I now can't remember. Probably Kiwis. But they don't count.

Anyway.

The make up or profile of the passenger manifest was far more multi-cultural than perhaps what would be typical on a US carrier. But it didn't make much difference when the situation turned to custard after the flight was cancelled. People are people, no matter what colour their skin or how different their mother tongue is to your own.

Let me explain.

When the Captain came on announcing the fact that some geek in flight operations had just cancelled our flight, and we had just wasted yet another 7+ hours of our life, the challenge in front of both EK and the Airport authority was what to do with the near 500 people on board. It wasn't like there was plenty of room. The gates were still overflowing from all the other cancelled and delayed flights.

It wasn't just a simple case of re-connecting the jetbridge's and letting us all de-plane. There was a significant security issue to deal with.

As you can appreciate, the A380 is a big bugger of a machine. The upper deck is all first and business class. 90-seats in total. The main deck is economy. I don't know how many. But a lot. You do the math. I'm tired.

Apparently, as the delay wore on and approached the 6-hour mark, some of the people down the back started to become unruly and a group of passengers decided to take matters into their own hands, and agreed to all band together. They were organising a coup.

Their mission was to open one of the rear doors, slide down the raft and make a run for it. To freedom. The fact that it was 18-degrees F outside escaped them. The windchill was in the single digits.

The pending coup and potential door opening exercise obviously didn't sit well with the crew. So there was a mexican stand-off. In their wisdom, the crew called the Port Authority Police. Except no one came. So they had to deal with this themselves. Which must have been a little nerve wracking.

Thankfully, the situation was contained, and there was no slide deployment, no more arm-waving and no more hysterics. Not yet anyway.

We finally heard the doors pop and a final instruction advising us to deplane. Whatever had happened, EK had obviously worked out a deal with the airport to let us off. We had been cooped up for just over 7-hours.

And then it started.

The economy section of the plane surrounded the podium at A7, where ONE poor, lonely EK staff member was trying to make himself heard. The passengers descended on him like pavlovs dog. It was mayhem. An actual physical fight broke out between 2 passengers. It started when a guy allegedly abused someone's mother for queue jumping. The mothers son was called in to defend the family honor. Fists started flying.

People started chanting "fight, fight, fight…." You know, the same way kids used to do in the school play ground. It was excellent. A little barbaric. But excellent all the same.

Sadly, the fight was over quite quickly. A couple of the other guys who were in the lounge with me were just about to walk upstairs, grab a couple of beers and chairs, and come back to watch the entertainment.

The Business and First customers were advised to make haste to the lounge, before anyone of us were seen, taken hostage by some economy passengers and a ransom demanded.

The vitriol didn't stop downstairs though. The premium passenger anger was no less subdued. There were about 30-people at the main reception counter at the front of the lounge. Normal, rational and I'm assuming, very successful professional people had lost it. They were pounding the desk and demanding that the station manager's head be delivered on a platter. He was no-where to be seen since the day prior.

I decided that there was no point getting in there as well. My arm waving ability was no match for a couple of the Indian women going at it full steam. I felt sorry for their husbands. And besides, it was time for a drink.

So me and another guy I befriended, headed for the bar. Let's call him Bill. Because that's his real name. Bill is an American - and is no stranger to weird and wonderful places and experiences. He lives and works in Kabul. That's Kabul, as in Afghanistan. Not downtown Illinois.

Bill made (and consumed) some amazing concoctions in the time I was with him the lounge. His favorite drink was Cranberry juice and Vodka. At anytime of the night or day. He used a brandy balloon. A big one. It used to crack me up. He'd fill the thing with 7 parts Vodka and one-part Cranberry. It was rocket fuel.

I don't think in all the time I was with him, did his heart rate rise above 55 beats per minute. Probably because like me, he was hammered 90% of the time. We became instant friends.

We were virtually the same age. He was divorced with 3-kids. And I was soon to be divorced with 2 kids of my own.

At one point, we both decided to call our kids to say hello. We thought we were doing the right thing. I called my daughter.

"Hello Princess, this is Dad", I said.
"Mum" my 7-year old called out, "Dad's on the phone"
"I think he's in jail. Again".
I interrupted.
"Princess, I'm actually stuck at the airport and have been here for 2-solid days. Don't you want to know how I am?" I said in my most solemn voice.
"Uh-huh", she grunted, with a care factor of -5
Then she said "Do they have a toy store there? What are you going to bring me?"
I said "How about a damn good thrashing when I get home". I was now losing it.
She replied "whatever". And promptly hung up the phone.

Bill received the same, tepid response from his kids. But his kids are a little older than mine and all they asked him was whether or not there was a Western Union at the airport and could he send money. Quickly.

It was starting to deteriorate even further now. And no-one knew what the hell was going on...

`X'

I await with bated breath.

Best.Report.Ever

nimenime

Awesome trip report!

eightblack

It's funny watching what happens to humans after you remove their ability to control their own environment. In essence, to me at least, that's the great part of travel. It defines a true FT'er. I love that uncertainty.

But many people hate it.

Because when you step foot inside an airport, you essentially do lose control of your own life until you get to your destination. When the snow storm hit New York on Sunday, people were sucked into the airport's complex operational web of processes and procedures (or lack thereof).

The airport, like many of it's passengers, went into survival mode.

Now don't get me wrong. This wasn't in the same dimension as war. Or even a real tragedy. But for some, it clearly may have been one of the worst experiences in their lives. Being stuck in an airport, with no ability to get home and with no real idea of when they would be able to finally leave.

Some would have run out of money, some would not have been able to call friends or family, some would not have had any other means or alternatives to get to where they needed to be. Some were going stir crazy simply by the unforeseeable nature of it all.

And those of us fortunate to be upstairs in the EK lounge, well, about the only dilemma we had was trying to decide should we eat the same thing again for dinner on day 2 of our ordeal or try something different. Had we run out of alcohol, well that would have been another matter entirely.

We had showers, clean bathrooms, food and wine, somewhere comfortable to sit (and even sleep) and we had each other. We also had access to a supposedly better quality of information, not that this helped that much.

It was now around 7.30am Tuesday morning. There was a pack of very unhappy campers at reception all insisting that their plight was the most urgent. The staff were flying blind in that all of the operational decisions were being driven by someone in Dubai. In effect, the local staff were helpless until they were told which aircraft would be flying and at which time.

Thankfully the EK duty manager had arrived and he was authorizing whatever was needed in order to get people moving.

By this stage, the airport had re-opened and flights were starting to arrive. EK now had the added problem of having 4 aircraft on the ground instead of the usual 2.

People had started to arrive for the normal, daily morning service to Dubai (a 777). I'm sure as they checked in, they would have been thinking, I'll just pop up to the lounge for perhaps a quiet breakfast, a soothing glass of champagne and maybe a quick read of the paper.

I'm sure many of these newcomers would have done a double take as soon as they hit reception. For one, many of the staff had not gone home in 2-days. They looked like they needed a good wash.

Then there was the state of the lounge.

Axl Rose from Guns n Roses couldn't have done a better job of destroying an environment. There were chairs all over the place, piled up dirty dishes and glassware strewn from one end of the lounge to the other, people had made makeshift "homes" like homeless people do, when staking out a new habitat.

Cushions, pillows, blankets, peoples luggage and clothes - all haplessly fused together in one horrific mess. This would have been nirvana to any teenager.

And then there was us. The guests. There was one guy who had been "in-residence" since Sunday. A large, rotund Indian man with his wife. He slept often. Except that when he slept, he snored. That's what happens when you put overweight mammals on their back.

Except this wasn't snoring. My parents snore. It is mildly annoying. And nothing a decent bottle of Merlot and a pair of earplugs wont fix.

But this was snoring at a whole new level. You could measure it on a richter scale. And the noise. Small children were running and hiding under tables. The curtains were being pulled off the wall. At one point, the staff came over and fenced off the area around him with one of those portable barriers - you know the ones they use in airports and bank queues with the retractable webbing. They were afraid someone was going to get sucked into the man's stomach.

His wife, despite the many glares, seemed oblivious to it all. I couldn't resist.

I approached her on one of my bar runs and said to her;
"thats quite a noise isn't it. It is magnificent!"

She did that Indian thing of rocking her head from side to side and smiling. It looked like she was saying no, when apparently it might or could mean yes.

I continued, "Do you want some help rolling him over?"
The head rocking continued.

"Would you like us to suffocate him with a pillow?"
More head rocking, only this time with attitude.

Plainly, the poor, hapless woman couldn't speak a word of english.

Eventually, the man would stir to life, scratch the parts of his body that all males scratch when they first awake no matter what their culture, and then walk off to the bathroom. Or to get something to eat. Sometimes he did both.

Problem was that he never wore pants. This was mildly disconcerting to some of the other female guests. Most of the guys in the lounge thought nothing of it, although it was perhaps an image you didn't want to see too often.

The biggest challenge now was trying to get on the next flight to Dubai. There was the daily 777 service, which was scheduled to leave that morning. It was re-timed to just after lunch. No seats.

Then there was the daily A380, now rescheduled to leave at 1am. Then there was the A380 that we were on from this morning, supposedly going at 3am. I found out later that I was re-booked on a third 380 service, scheduled to depart on Wed at 1pm. Which meant the prospect of staying in the lounge for another full 24+ hours.

Clearly this was unacceptable.

Sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing. Which is what I did. You see, the situation with flights, flight options, crew availability and the decision making out of Dubai was so fluid, that things were changing every 5-minutes.

I was lucky in the sense that I could move in a moments notice. I had carry on. And that was a huge advantage. EK didn't have to worry about connecting me with my luggage.

My triple-7 pilot buddy was now on the phone to flight operations in Dubai. He had also logged into the EK employee portal, the specific one for pilots. The situation was grim.

While he may have been on vacation, he desperately needed to be back at work as he was scheduled to fly in 2-days time. And he needed a full day for travel back to Dubai.

Because I was exhausted, I decided to have a lie down. Nothing much could be done anyway, because after the mornings 777 service departed, there were no more scheduled (or unscheduled) flights leaving until much, much later that night.

I was hoping that the journey was nearly over...

ccqueenanne

Don't leave us hanging!

roadwarriorafrica

Absolutely riveting read. Waiting in the swimming pool with a cold beer - 32 celcius and clear skies. Next instalment

olafman

Brilliant saga of a modern man's commute home. I love that you seem to have kept a positive attitude. Luckily alcohol can help keep that attitude up.

I just keep thinking of how it would have been to spend that time in a UA RCC or AA Admirals Club. A packet of Goldfish and two drink coupons would have been thin offerings.