Airports are [censored] ricidulous

[Voltron87]

4 hours? thats it? you are way overhyping it.

[benza13]

Might as well share one of my airports suck stories. Flying home from Vegas once, get to our layover stop with about 45 minutes before our next flight, check the monitors and everything seems cool. Run to grab some food quick and rush through our meal. Get to the gate ~10 minutes before scheduled takeoff right as they are announcing that it is delayed. Delays continue, keep getting pushed back an hour at a time. Turns out (we find out after about 4 hours) that our flight crew is stuck at another airport due to bad weather and we have to wait for them, of course they knew this the whole time and failed to tell us. Not to mention they gave us food vouchers after all the restaurants were already closed. After about an 8 hour wait, we finally take off. We also have to make an extra stop along the way to drop off some other stranded passengers. Arrive at 4:30 am instead of 8:30 pm, and after a long weekend in Vegas I dont think you can get more tired than I was getting off that last plane.

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

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4 hours? thats it? you are way overhyping it.

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Yeah, but 2.5 of it was sitting in the airplane on the ground. The real kicker was that there was still something wrong with the plane and the pilot basically said "[censored] it I'm going anyway."

[4_2_it]

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The captain came on the PA a few minutes later and said something about how there's a problem with the plane that they couldn't fix, but "we're just going to take off anyway".

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Was the pilot a heavy set middle age man wearing a bright blue shirt and a hat with an anchor on it? Was the co-pilot a lanky fella with a bright red shirt?

[Brom]

Wow, I always thought it was a myth that planes get delayed. The kind of thing I always see people complaining about, but never experienced myself.

I fly somewhere and back about one or two times each month, and have done it for the last 4 years. I have never had a plane leave anything less than on time, and usually they are early. I should say that I never fly trans-Atlanticly, and the average flight doesn't contain a connecting flight either.

[BoogerFace]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
4 hours? thats it? you are way overhyping it.

[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, but 2.5 of it was sitting in the airplane on the ground. The real kicker was that there was still something wrong with the plane and the pilot basically said "[censored] it I'm going anyway."

[/ QUOTE ]

I doubt the pilot made the call. Usually they have to get a fax from 'the home office' is some thing is broken. This happened to me once. One of the cockpit windshields was cracked, maintenance patched it, and they needed a signoff from somewhere before takeoff.

[Voltron87]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
4 hours? thats it? you are way overhyping it.

[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, but 2.5 of it was sitting in the airplane on the ground. The real kicker was that there was still something wrong with the plane and the pilot basically said "[censored] it I'm going anyway."

[/ QUOTE ]


2.5 is a bitch, but not extraordinary. I've done 7 hours on the ground in the plane waiting to takeoff.

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

As an aside, did you guys know that planes are struck by birds about 16500 times a year? There are about 8500 cases where it's unknown what kind of bird it is, but of the times where the kind of bird can be determined, the birds colliding the most are passerines, hitting 2500+ times, followed closely by gulls nearly 2400 times and raptors just over 1000 times. Also, there are 45 incidents of birds hitting parked planes. The most common flight segment for bird collision is during approach for landing, hitting about 5000 times, followed by take-off at about 3200. About 2700 birds are hit as the plane is rolling down the runway on landing and 2200 as it's climbing.

This is according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

[tonypaladino]