The one thing I always maintain when flying is that I won’t relax until I’m actually on the ground in my destination.  This isn’t a safety thing, it’s an actual “LaGuardia is the worst airport in the history of the world except possibly JFK” thing.  I cannot even begin to count how many times I’ve been on a plane, taxiing towards the runway for an on-time departure, when there’s been some sort of problem – 98.3% of the time from LGA’s end – and I’ve been stuck sitting on runway or tarmac for a while.

This is what happened to me today.  7am flight.  Early in the morning.  Should be no problems.  Get to RDU this morning and successfully still have a ticket (yesterday’s incident had not haunted me at 6am this morning, thankfully).  We board at a reasonable time and start taxiing towards the runway in order to take off at our scheduled time.  Then suddenly, we stop.

Pilot gets on the PA and goes, “Well, it seems that LGA is having ground delays, as usual.  We’ll be delayed here as a result for around 20 minutes.”  It’s never a good sign when the ‘fashion seat belts” light goes off.  We wait.  20 minutes later, we’re told that we have to wait another 10 minutes to call us back and let us know what time we can be rescheduled to depart.  Naturally.  The flight attendant makes a hilarious comment at this point to us, remarking, “Gotta love NY.  There’s always delays, even early in the morning.”

During this 10 minutes, something interesting happens.  Now, I’m sitting in seat 1F, which is the window seat in the very first row on the right side of the plane.  This isn’t the most ideal seat in the world but being that US Airways bumped me off this flight that I booked back at the very beginning of September because they didn’t know that their own plane actually took off on Saturday, I had no option in my seating.  However, I would have missed what happened next had I not been sitting here.  The flight attendant gets a phone call, distinctly says, “I understand” and unbuckles her seat belt.  Then she gets up, opens the door to the airplane and lets the pilot out.

Yes, the pilot got out of the plane.

The man sitting next to me and I look at each other and go, “Well, that can’t be good.”  We can’t see what he’s doing on the left side of the plane, but then I see him go around to the wing on the right side of the plane.  He wipes the condensation off of it with his hand and then comes back on to the plane and tells the flight attendant, “We’re good.”  At this point, I’m wondering if “we’re good” means “We’re not going to crash if we ever do take off” or “We’re actually going to get this plane in the air.”

About a minute later, he tell us that we’ve got a departure time of 10 minutes.  Finally – but only 40 minutes late (and it’s sad that one has to consider “only 40 minutes” a true blessing when flying) we take off.

To her credit, the flight attendant kinda rocked.  She reduced the price of water, soda, and juice to $1 from $2, alcohol from $7 to I believe $6, and gave us free coffee and Biscoff (yay! only thing I miss about Delta are those cookies man).  I was confused when she said that coffee and tea were free and she told me and the man next to me that “Since we waited 40 minutes on the runway, it’s the least I could do.  Plus, ya’ll probably could use some caffeine.  I know I could!”

So yeah, another trip to Raleigh in the car, another unnecessary airline drama over.  I had a great trip – the whole not stressing about having to work thing really worked out well haha – and I’ll post more about that later or tomorrow morning.