By the time the bus ever got to EWR you'd be looking at rush hour traffic to get out of EWR/NYC Metro. Worse congestion than a EWR runway at 5:00pm on a Thursday afternoon

I was booked on NW655 today (EWR-DTW). Frustrating as I was looking from my mobile phone as I drove over from Long Island. Knowing the inbound aircraft was 656 I pulled up the status of that and I saw at 2p that it was diverting to ABE (it was still in the air). So I call the elite line and the agent informed that she has no knowledge of what aircraft will be used for NW655. Since NW655 was still showing on-time she couldn't do anything for me.

When I finally got to Term B at EWR the plane was showing 20 minutes late. I laughed and said to myself there was no chance in hell of that happening. Even with a 75 mile flight (ABE-EWR), you basically have to get sequenced into the EWR landing pattern before take off which means the plane was gonna sit for awhile - assuming they could fix it. Then, who wants to get onto a plane that just went mechanical and diverted during a very short flight between DTW & EWR? I'd have probably gotten on but I could see some people requesting a flight change.

NW655 finally cancelled at 350p. A call to the elite line got things squared away for me. I wound up on CO2287 EWR-MEM and then NW953 MEM-SEA. The CO jungle jet was leaving in 45 minutes so I had to hoof it over to Term A and re-clear security with "SSSS" on my BP. Thankfully I asked the NW agent to cross it off, which she did and she wrote "Reroute NWA". The TSA guy was confused by this but asked a supervisor and they let me through without the anal cavity search.

I wound up landing in SEA 20 minutes behind my originally scheduled DTW-SEA flight (which btw was 40 minutes late). So I flew more miles and got in earlier. Cool!

-RM