Home from Toronto
I was surprised how beautiful downtown Toronto was. Dinner at the CN Tower Friday night, Niagara Falls Saturday. Fun trip with great friends.
Didn't get home until close to 10:30pm last night. I had very bad luck with planes this weekend, Friday morning's flight being delayed 3 1/2 hours (weather-related), and last night's flight delayed for two hours. That plane was a small commuter jet and the original one hour delay was due to mechanical issues with the plane. After the plane was loaded, there was a discrepancy with the number of passengers. The flight attendants counted 66, the airport said 67, and the gate said 67 passengers. They wouldn't let us leave until they found that other passenger. Personally - that passenger (terrorist or just confused and lost) wasn't on our plane so what did it matter to us? They should have found his/her luggage, dropped it off the plane and let us take off. An hour later they finally let us take off. No idea how that was resolved but no one else ever got on our plane.
The pilot on that flight however must have been really bored, or just desperate to talk to someone. During the delay prior to the flight it was the pilot who gave us the updates, adding in little anectdotes and personal observations. During the flight he would get on the speaker and talk about "this little gadget we have up front - that tells us what direction the wind is coming from. Right now it's mostly coming from the back which means we have a tail wind. It's a very nice 50mph wind which will get us to Atlanta faster. Every now and then it's coming from different directions. That causes the bumps. Now yesterday, that wind was around 70mph due to bad weather in the area. The Atlanta airport was closed for three hours due to this bad weather. You can imagine we had a lot of unhappy people." And so on and so on. He would tell us what part of each US state we were flying over. "Right now we are over Lake Ontario. From the left side of the plane you can see windmills. Those windmills were built in (etc etc) .... I'll be back to give you updates in about 50 minutes." Ten minutes later we would hear, "This is your captain from the flight deck, that bump you just felt was...."
Didn't get home until close to 10:30pm last night. I had very bad luck with planes this weekend, Friday morning's flight being delayed 3 1/2 hours (weather-related), and last night's flight delayed for two hours. That plane was a small commuter jet and the original one hour delay was due to mechanical issues with the plane. After the plane was loaded, there was a discrepancy with the number of passengers. The flight attendants counted 66, the airport said 67, and the gate said 67 passengers. They wouldn't let us leave until they found that other passenger. Personally - that passenger (terrorist or just confused and lost) wasn't on our plane so what did it matter to us? They should have found his/her luggage, dropped it off the plane and let us take off. An hour later they finally let us take off. No idea how that was resolved but no one else ever got on our plane.
The pilot on that flight however must have been really bored, or just desperate to talk to someone. During the delay prior to the flight it was the pilot who gave us the updates, adding in little anectdotes and personal observations. During the flight he would get on the speaker and talk about "this little gadget we have up front - that tells us what direction the wind is coming from. Right now it's mostly coming from the back which means we have a tail wind. It's a very nice 50mph wind which will get us to Atlanta faster. Every now and then it's coming from different directions. That causes the bumps. Now yesterday, that wind was around 70mph due to bad weather in the area. The Atlanta airport was closed for three hours due to this bad weather. You can imagine we had a lot of unhappy people." And so on and so on. He would tell us what part of each US state we were flying over. "Right now we are over Lake Ontario. From the left side of the plane you can see windmills. Those windmills were built in (etc etc) .... I'll be back to give you updates in about 50 minutes." Ten minutes later we would hear, "This is your captain from the flight deck, that bump you just felt was...."