Winging It

Not all the seats in our A321 US Airways/Aeroflot return flight from LAX last night were available. Not really.

I was almost over the marathon sixteen hour July 5th Southwest flight from PHL to Albuquerque- yes, the one which was diverted from a Chicago stopover to a Dallas stopover to avoid O'Hare delays on the stormiest day DFW has seen since Tom Landry was fired- and memories of the Convict Air-like flight from PHL to LAX on the 12th with it's gulag aisle bullies dangling a pack of peanuts in front of your face and asking, 'Who's your friend, now?', were slowly receding from consciousness.

But yesterday, the easy, and early, shuttle ride from Simi Valley; the jovial ticket agent switching our so-so seats for the coveted leg stretchers by the portside B emergency door, and the gosh-darn-gee-whiz-glad-to-be-flying attitude of the staff on board would not last. Somewhere between the purple mountain's majesty and the fruited plain the awww shucks demeanor gave way to flight attendants racing up and down the aisle carrying trash bags and scrub brushes. Now, that will turn heads aboard an airplane.

I am certain that the LAX ground crew loaded enough fuel into the tanks to make the cross country journey and I have no doubt that the concession folks loaded plenty of fine Coca-Cola company products into every available storage cubby for our enjoyment, but someone must have forgotten to 'drop' certain tanks during the turnaround. To put it politely, our airplane left LAX with a full load, if you catch my drift.

When the volumetric exhaustion limit of our passenger convenience system (that's pilot talk) was met- no, exceeded, actually judging by the number of plastic garbage bags used- certain 'seats' aboard our A321 were taken out of service. Most of the passengers were able to maintain, but the forehead sweat bead count rose dramatically when the flight deck announced that we were being stacked up coming into PHL. After some serious negotiating with the control tower, we were told that our flight had been given priority landing status as an act of mercy, I can only guess, to those who would need to clean the plane later that night. Of course, in the PHL world priority landing status could mean being moved from fourteenth to thirteenth in the queue and nothing more.

We landed rather quickly and in a concluding note, I must say that never have so many people deplaned in such a short time and with such a collective sense of purpose as we did last night. By the time I fly again, I hope that this memory too will have faded from my consciousness and I will be, once gain, gosh-darn-gee-whiz-glad-to-be-flying.