Saturday Morning Post

Chicago - Very late Thursday night or very early Friday morning

I'm late, I'm late!  My Saturday morning post is late. I usually prepare and schedule posts ahead of time, sometimes a couple of weeks ahead of time.  Somehow this morning slipped by without a scheduled post.  Sorry!  

It is not the only thing that was late this week, my flight home on Thursday was a cascade of late.  I was in Galveston Texas for a couple of nights,  I had 17 minutes on the agenda on Wednesday.  I arrived at the airport in Houston at about noon for my flight home, and my 4:15 PM flight was already showing delayed, making my connection time in Chicago a bit tight.  There was a 1:05 PM flight to Chicago, I asked, and as a "gold" level frequent flyer, they put me on the standby list.  Amazingly I snagged the last seat on the plane, and then it was delayed.  Delayed about an hour.  We arrived in Chicago, pulled up to the gate, the ground crew unloaded the luggage, and fueled the plane, and we waited for the jetbridge.  The ground crew loaded the luggage for the next flight, and we waited and waited for the jetbridge to move.  It didn't move, it was broken.  They towed the plane to another gate, and we got off - over half an hour after arriving at the first gate.  No problem for me, my next flight was nearly three hours away. 

Then my 8:15 PM flight was delayed, until 10:00 PM, then 10:30PM, then 11:30 PM, then 1:00AM.  Then the flight crew was out of "legal hours."  They woke up a couple of pilots who rattled in about 12:30 AM, then they were missing flight attendants.  The passengers started joking that we could fill in, we all know the routine, how to buckle a seat belt, just show me the switch to turn off the lights and how to close the doors and I can do the rest.  Finally about 1:00 AM a flight landed at the gate next to us, and three supervisors went on the plane and kidnapped the flight attendants (broke the news to them, that they had one more flight to do) brought them over and pushed them down the jetbridge to our plane.  We started boarding at 1:11 AM, left about 1:30.  The pilot said, "good news, at this hour of the night there are no air traffic control delays, and control has given me permission to ignore fuel conservation - our flying time will be a very short 91 minutes (the scheduled flight time is 2 hours and 32 minutes.) 

We arrived just after 4:00 AM (there is a one hour change of time zone,) I learned something new, that is the time the airport opens.  We were either very very late, or very very early.  

Still, it is not the longest delay I have ever had.  

Was I late, or early?