Yes. I made it on time to work. Sounds like something so simple and yet if you saw the procedure to “get to work”, it wouldn’t sound as easy as you would think. Unless you show up half an hour early to work just to sign in! The tram no longer goes to Concourse A in Cincinnati since they closed it to the public and usually the escalators are not functional either, which means that all of the employees from more than one airline have to share one very slow elevator to get up to the top level. Pull heavy suitcase, flight case, lunch bag and whatever else through thick carpet up a hill and past the “people movers” that also are out of service. Add in one coded turnstile (not made for a person and their bags), three coded doors and a set of stairs and you’re almost there.

Makes security sound like fun. What? Never!

Check in, back up the stairs, grab my bags, walk past the unusable moving walkway, through the thick carpet (luckily now downhill) through the coded door and down the escalator [which is for some glorious reason is working] past the tram that whizzes by with speed as if laughing, up the escalator and off to gate 5.

Okay, so that was a bit dramatic. I wrote it that way as a dramatic lead into the fact that the aircraft wasn’t even at the gate and the flight was delayed for at least an hour. Oh yeah, it’s nothing new. After all, it’s New York City. But, why NYC?

If you didn’t already know, New York City has some of the busiest and most congested airports in the country and JFK in particular is down to one runway, which only adds to the issue when weather is a factor. I was only on as a passenger going to work this time so I sat in the back and listened to the passengers talk as we boarded and then tried to get out of Cincinnati. I found it funny when the woman in front of us said “just put it at your feet and put your sweater over it”. Oh yeah, because that works every time. Really? A sweater simply suspended in air all by itself. It didn’t work and the passenger that was so ill advised still had to push the bag forward. She lived.

So, what happened to make the aircraft come in late in the first place thus delaying ours you ask? Weather. Since I am sure that you can understand a snowball, we’ll use that analogy. That aircraft was held up by Air Traffic Control due to weather. This in turn caused our flight to be delayed by an hour, which caused the next flight taking that aircraft to be late and the aircraft we were taking out to be late. See, just like a snow ball that starts out small and continues to grow, so do the problems affecting more than one flight. “But why don’t they just use another aircraft”, I have been asked? Unfortunately, the airlines cannot afford to simply have another airplane and crew to take flights just because it would make everyone else’s life easier. Actually, they do have other crew members [most of the time] that could come over if say I decide that I am sick and can’t go. However, we are a bit less expensive that an entire aircraft.

The bigger possible problem are the passengers that are either going overseas or to see a Broadway show. Luckily, JFK offers a lot more options to get to overseas destinations than cities like Cincinnati that only offers a flight to Paris. I found three flights to Rome, two flights to London and five flights to Paris. Unfortunately for the passengers last night, there is only one flight to Casablanca and it leaves out of Terminal 1 at 8:01pm (Delta leaves out of Terminals 2 and 3). At first I thought that they should have left earlier however, if you think about it, they actually had 4 hours to get there and it was only due to the delay that they probably missed it.

So what should you do if you are making such a long flight that only happens once a day? Check the weather that morning and always remember that by 4:00pm, the world of travel could have seriously deteriorated. This is especially true for big cities like New York City.

to be continued….