My plane broke twice, so I spent the night in the airport.

PART 1 (of 2)

Scene: you’ve just spent 3 whole days at the beach with your best friend. You’re a sun-kissed bronze beauty, recharged and ready to resume your mothering responsibilities. But, strategically, you’ve taken the latest flight you possibly could in order to take full advantage of your time away.

At 7:00pm, you hug your bestie goodbye and head to your gate, ready to board your *first class* flight and return home by 9:30pm. You sit down in your *first class* seat, accept a glass of wine, crack open your book, and wait for all the other peasants to finish boarding the flight. Everything seems normal until the Captain makes an announcement, “Sorry folks, we’re having a small power problem with our AC, but once we’re up in the air, the cabin will cool off quickly.” Huh, no problem, you think to yourself. The flight attendants start their final passes and you text your husband that you’ll be home soon.

THEN THE PLANE TURNS OFF. Like, totally off. No lights, no engines. Completely off. Dead silent.

“Folks, errr, uhhh, we’re just switching from one power source to another, bear with us,” the Captain says.

AND THEN…

“It’s broken, we have to deplane.” - random worker guy outside the plane.

Then, the flight attendant or copilot (somebody up front) says, “They’re trying to restore power to the airplane.” Keep in mind, I’m in *first class* so I’m *very* close to the front and able to hear EVERYTHING. (Unlike the peasants in the back.)

So then the flight attendants start freaking out. They’re pacing, they’re chatting amongst themselves, and then we hear one of them say, “To me, this is an emergency. We can’t keep these people on the plane. We have no power at all, no lights, no air, nothing.”

Then the same random worker guy outside the plane goes, “Get everyone off the plane immediately, there is no power to the plane.”

The flight attendant then grabs a megaphone and says, “I’ve never gotten to use this before!” (😬) She then instructs everyone to grab their belongings and get off the plane as quickly as possible. So we deplane and head back inside.

Now, had a plane in India not just VERY recently fallen out of the sky (a truly horrific and heartbreaking accident), I maybe would have been slightly more *chill* about this whole incident. To the average human, it would appear that maybe a plane falling out of the sky ALSO had a power problem. BUT WHAT DO I KNOW??

So once we’re all back inside, the first wave of chaos ensues. The majority of the passengers sat back down and patiently waited to hear what would happen next. But, another large group immediately jumped in line to quickly figure out new flights due to now-missed connections, refunds because they were NOT about to get on a broken airplane (I mean, SAME!), could they get their checked bags off the plane, should they rent a car and drive at this point, and just general questions about whether or not the plane is actually broken and is it safe to fly.

{Meanwhile, the TSA is literally making announcements in the background that the airport is closing. I didn’t even know airports closed, but apparently small ones do. So, the shops, security, and the car rental desk were therefore locked up for the day, unlike my appetite.}

The really fun part of all this is that the gate attendant was nowhere to be found. They had apparently jumped ship as soon as the last passenger boarded our plane and left. So, poor little Ethan, another airport worker, had to step in and figure out how to serve all of these angry and (slightly) panicked customers. Bless Ethan - he was so calm and trying his very best to assure us that the plane itself was not broken, but rather, “it was an equipment problem with the power source they use to power the plane at the gate.” Upon googling this, maybe he was referencing the APU?

Ethan DID, in very high confidence, tell me the plane would not fall out of the sky and it was indeed going to be safe to fly once they fixed it. 🥴 So, that made me feel…better?

Maybe 15 minutes later, another worker from outside comes inside and announces, “We will not be getting anyone’s bags off the plane. Your bag will be at your final destination.”

Thank goodness I only had a carry on, but at this point, and only looking back now, had this become comical. I’ve also never been more grateful for a tiny glass of wine. It was working overtime, let me just tell you. I’m assuming they weren’t going to get anyone’s bags because there was no power to the plane and they were not about to crawl around with a flashlight to pick out certain bags.

People then start FUH-REAKING out because they have medication in their checked bags, they’re demanding refunds so they can just leave the airport altogether and fly another time, and are very much expressing that they do not want to get back on a plane that is, supposedly not, broken.

Maybe 15 minutes later, the same lady who broke the news about not retrieving anyone’s bags then lets everyone know that they’ve fixed the problem and we can begin boarding again.

So, the other *first class* passengers and myself get back in line and walk back onto the airplane. We store our carry-on bags, sit down, and say a quick prayer that it’s actually fixed. I texted my husband and family that we had once again boarded and then, THE POWER GOES OUT AGAIN.

So we deplane. Again.

We go back inside, and as you might imagine, PEOPLE AREN’T HAPPY.

On my way back down the tunnel, I actually bumped into the Captain and literally asked him, “Are we really going to be able to take off on this plane?” And he said, “Yes, we’re going to try our very best. We’re going to borrow a piece of equipment from another airline. It’s not the plane.”

(Which really made me question why we couldn’t just like, go to a different gate? No idea.)

So poor Ethan is again trying to calm people down and very confidently and calmly explain that it is not an airplane problem, it’s just an equipment problem. Even though the airplane has now shut down twice. People are growing increasingly more frustrated, mainly because there has been zero communication to the group as a whole. Everyone was basically playing ‘telephone’ trying to figure out what was going on.

As I’m standing off to the side, frantically trying to charge my phone, I see a flight attendant walk by and talk to a guy standing in line. He looked pretty surprised by their conversation so after the flight attendant left, I walked over and asked what she said. Here’s what I texted my husband,

“Oh my gosh the flight attendant just told a guy that she didn’t feel comfortable taking this plane in the first place but the pilot wanted to use it bc it was his final flight {of the day}. She said the power shut off when it landed. And now twice with us.”

So apparently the plane was ALREADY having issues before we ever got on it.

A few minutes later, the TV screen above the gate updated. “Now departs: 8:00am”

TO BE CONTINUED.

(*This was my first time flying first class. The peasant joke is in fact, a joke.)

-Sarah
sarahinglecreative.com
marketingmadesimple.com/sarahinglecreative

This post was written from my own mind, with my own hands. No AI. All thoughts (and typos) are my own.