The Surprises of Flying

By Tom Kando

I recently returned from Holland. I do a lot of long-distance flying. It may sound like fun and glamorous, but at my age, it’s becoming less so. Let me suggest the following variant of Murphy’s Law:
Only one thing is sure, when you fly long-distance: There will be “surprises.”
Put differently: The greatest surprise of any long-distance trip is if there are no surprises. For example: This time, the “surprise” happened upon my arrival at Amsterdam international airport. When I get there, I usually take the train straight from the airport to my final destination, Alkmaar, a city about an hour north of Amsterdam.

As usual, I retrieved my baggage and cleared customs and passport control rapidly, and I immediately walked up to the train ticket booth inside the great arrival hall to buy my ticket to Alkmaar. There, the clerk tells me (and to dozens of other passengers) that all train traffic from the airport has been halted. Why? Because someone has just committed suicide by jumping in front of a train between the airport and Amsterdam. The clerk informs us nonchalantly that this happens frequently. He advises me to take the bus instead.

Meanwhile, giant Airbusses and Boeings land every minute at one of the world’s busiest airports, and disgorge thousands of passengers, many of whom usually take the train to Amsterdam and elsewhere. It’s pandemonium.

I exit the airport’s arrival hall and roll my baggage to the bus stop area from where dozens of buses swarm out to different places. It’s total chaos. There are no lines, only mobs and stampedes. Everyone is shoving, stepping on each other and trying to fight his way onto a bus. The authorities have requisitioned tour busses to help out, in addition to the regular public busses. You can try to shove your way through the front door or the rear door, it doesn’t matter. No tickets are being sold, no payments expected. All you have to do is try to get on, along with your suitcase(s). I succeed, rolling my suitcase and stepping on a lot of toes. I get on a bus towards Amsterdam, and I connect to another bus to Alkmaar. I reach my final destination five hours after I landed. What a fun surprise this was, after a 20-hour overnight trip from Sacramento!

Every time I am about to fly far away, I become apprehensive. Of course, not out of fear of flying. That’s an absurd phobia. Any rational risk assessment proves that flying to Europe is safer than driving to the supermarket.

No. What makes me dislike these trips more and more as I get older is the discomfort, the fatigue, the headaches, all the other aches and pains, the bugs I pick up, the sleepless nights, and above all the inevitable "surprises.” Total door-to-door travel time to Europe ranges from 20 to 30 hours, including ground transportation, at least one connection, waiting, clearing security, customs and passport control, etc.

In March 2010, the surprise was the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajőkull volcano. It halted nearly all North-Atlantic air traffic. I was scheduled to return from Holland at the time, and I had to delay my return home by several day.

In September 2008, I arrived at Sacramento airport to leave for the Netherlands. Hurricane Ike had just hit the Gulf Coast, including Houston, where I was supposed to connect. My flight was canceled and I was told to try again the next day.

In July 2005, there was the Russell Square terrorist attack in London. I happened to be in Holland, scheduled to fly home that day. My connecting flight to London was canceled. Because I had a frequent flyer ticket, I was at the bottom of the list for re-assignment. They gave me a $6 breakfast voucher and told me to somehow get my ass to London on another flight, and try to connect there. It took me two and half days to get home. I connected in London, Chicago and Dallas. I slept in Dallas (at my own expense, because the airlines are not responsible for terrorism).

In February 2004, a freak snowstorm halted all train traffic in the Netherlands, just the day that I was supposed to fly home. I was stranded in the town of Zaandam, 20 miles from the airport. I managed to hitch a car ride with a member of the Dutch senate, who herself was flying out that day.

There are many other aggravations. A real bad one is when you (almost) miss your connection because the flight you are on gets there too late. Sometimes you have to run to the connecting gate/terminal at Olympic speed, swimming in your sweat and risking heart attack.

Often, our seat assignments are jacked up. When we get ready to board, we discover that we have been separated, or that we are sitting in bad seats. A couple of years ago, we were relocated to the very last seats, near the toilets, where it stinks, where people stand talking, and where the seats don’t recline. Last year, my wife and I were seated far apart, even though we had reserved adjacent seats, of course. Years ago, the same thing happened to my children, my wife and myself: the four of us were dispersed all over a jumbo jet flying to London, instead of getting the four seats we had reserved many weeks in advance.

I have never yet lost my baggage permanently (cross my fingers), but I can’t recall how often my baggage has failed to arrive on the same flight as me. There was the time when my wife and I landed in Frankfurt, from where we were supposed to take the train to Salzburg. The airline told us that our baggage would arrive the following day, and that it would follow us by train to Salzburg. Good luck with that!

Some years ago, the airline entered a wrong birth date on my wife’s ticket. As that birth date didn’t match her true birth date on her passport, this nearly prevented her from flying out. Printing your boarding pass in advance sometimes works, sometimes it doesn’t, depending on what computer you use.

On a rare occasion, the surprise is good: This year, I volunteered to be bumped from an overbooked flight. My reward for flying just two hours later was an $800 voucher and a first class seat. Same thing happened that time when my children, my wife and I were separated on that London flight: After I complained vociferously, they gave us four adjacent first-class seats.

But you know what? The bottom line is: I prefer NO surprises, period! And that, I’m afraid, is never going to happen.

Email Tom