Monday, August 4, 2008

Stuck In Seattle

And sleepless, too.

The blasted airplane broke some gizmo in the Engine Dept. (Caps intentional), so here I am at Seattle-Tacoma International. We had backed away from the gate at 7:50AM PDT, and were just starting to taxi when one of the 737's two engines was shut down. We went back to the gate, the airplane mechanics looked at it (and scratched and belched, no doubt), then they declared the engine unfixable for an undetermined amount of time, and that they would reschedule us, and would we please go to Carousel #9 to retrieve our bags so we could go through the ticketing/bag check-in process all over again?

(snark) Thank you for flying Continental! (/snark)

I shouldn'g bitch, I guess. At least the damned engine didn't quit during take-off.

I've had a pretty good grouch going since 9:30AM, but I'm mostly over it now. I rolled out at 4AM to get from Olympia to SeaTac in plenty of time, since I knew that I was going to have to deal with TSA people for a while (more on that in a later post).

My new flight takes off at 9:30PM and I arrive at Jacksonville at 10:30AM tomorrow morning, presuming the weather doesn't get in the way.

Sigh.

You just gotta know it's going to be a bad week when....

1 comment:

carmilevy said...

Lovely. I'm also glad that the failure happened when it did. Minor things on the ground have an annoying habit of becoming major things in the air.

I was once on a Scare Canada flight - a Dash 8 Series 100 - whose right-side brakes failed on touchdown at the little airport on the island in Lake Ontario, just in the shadow of Toronto's CN Tower. We heard a massive bang, followed by the stomach-twisting feeling of the plane slewing to the side. Oh joy.

The captain kept us on the runway - barely - and managed to stop safely. We had to walk to the terminal, and they pulled the plane out of service. I missed an entire day of work (was flying to London) before they brought in another aircraft. To this day, I count rows to the exits when I board, and review the safety procedures without exception. You just never know...

Hope you made it home OK.