Winging It

My gf was on Southwest #82 last night (PHL-MHT). At home, the southwest website and phl.org said the flight originally scheduled for 8:45pm was set to depart at 10pm. So, I dropped her off at 9:00pm. She wound up departing at 12:30am. However, at 12:30am, there were 20 planes ahead of them for takeoff! She got to her destination in a suburb of Boston at 3:30am. What a nightmare!

Well, let's just hope that today's return flight to the Bay area will not be a reprise of last Friday's adventure in modern travel into PHL. Friday's five hour takeoff delay taxed the upper, or outer, limits of human adaptation to stress. To begin, drinking a month's worth of Peet's coffee in a five hour span is not a recommended coping mechanism unless one is planning on doing a reality show on TV where a frenetic look is an asset. With a Peet's buzz in place, one may now munch on a Snickers bar while scanning the covers of magazine in the news stand. Amazing what one can learn in five hours- everything from how to add a 600 hp turbocharger to your KIA's engine to selecting the right color for your tea rose trellis. And, yes, a few Dr. Phil stories along the way.

Chocolate fingerprints on your boarding pass will not stop you from spending yet another five hours in the air looking out onto the darkness of middle America in between episodes of scanning the SkyMall magazine and wondering, 'Who buys this stuff?'. More coffee? No thank you.

Collective spirits rise as the plane finally descends from the clouds for the long awaited landing into PHL. Oh, the sparkle of the refinery lights across the mighty Delaware; the twinkle of the car headlights moving along I-95, and the towering majesty of the buildings of Center City. Life is good. Yep, that's a smile on my big mug. Touchdown. Rollout. Turn onto the taxiway. Still smiling. Crackle of the intercom which will welcome us to Philadelphia and for flying this airline. What's that? We have no gate to deplane from? Twenty flights ahead of us? Two more hours in this plane? Not smiling, now.

Last Friday, computers, software, standard operating procedures, federal regulations and immutable fail safe mechanisms all conspired to insure that every person flying made it to their destination alive- albeit a little late. And for this I am thankful. As we continue to tax the upper, and outer, limits of adaptation for our air travel system, we should prepare ourselves for more days like the one we experienced this past Friday but we should also prepare ourselves for investment in the larger and more robust systems which will maintain our flying safety. Now, about my Peet's coffee buzz....