O.T. - WSJ article about stranded (winter) Northwest Airlines flight.
April 28, 1999
Seven Hours of Sitting and Waiting Leaves
Northwest Passengers Near Breaking Point
By SUSAN CAREY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The 757's toilets overflowed. A hysterical passenger vowed to blow an
emergency door and jump into the freezing darkness. A grown man wept and
begged to be freed. The air stank. Babies screamed. Adults screamed, too.
Anyone who flies regularly has an airline horror
story. But short of a crash or a hijacking, few
trips are likely to compare to the one taken by
the 198 passengers and crew of Northwest
Airlines Flight 1829 over the first weekend of the
year. It arrived about 22 hours late, and was
trapped on the tarmac at its destination for nearly
seven hours more. The Wall Street Journal has
pieced together what it was like aboard that
plane, minute by minute.
Fasten your seat belts. It's a bumpy ride.
* * *
On Saturday, Jan. 2, 153 vacationers, many
decked out in designer resort wear, arrived at the
Princess Juliana International Airport on the
Caribbean island of St. Martin for the early
afternoon departure of Flight 1829. The holidays
were over.
The flight was scheduled for five hours, a
straight shot back into Detroit, Northwest's
largest hub. Most of the passengers were from Michigan, and most were
professionals: money managers, bankers, physicians, business owners,
educators. Many own villas or time-shares on the island. Some passengers had
their children with them, and there were kids traveling with nannies.
From the start, there were glitches. The airport's
check-in computers broke down, fouling up seat
assignments. Some passengers were given the
same seats as Bill and Diane Goldstein, a couple
from West Bloomfield, Mich.
Told by attendants to find other seats, the Goldsteins first bristled, then did as
they were directed -- by marching into first class and plopping down. A
ground agent threatened to throw them off the plane if they didn't return to
coach; the dispute ended when the other travelers moved out of the Goldsteins'
original seats. The Goldsteins' act galled many crew members and passengers,
but the couple's chutzpah would later come in handy.
Other passengers worried about the weather up
north. Barbara Ruskin, a 54-year old guidance
counselor at a middle school in Bloomfield Hills,
Mich., is a nervous flier. She'd been tracking a
big Midwestern storm on CNN. It scared her.
"How are they going to land?" she asked her
husband, Bob. "Honey, it's going to be fine,"
Mr. Ruskin reassured her.
The blizzard, in fact, was dumping inch after
inch of snow in Michigan. But in balmy St.
Martin, Capt. Peter Stabler received
instructions to proceed to Detroit.
Capt. Stabler, 41 years old and a 15-year
Northwest veteran, saw nothing unusual in
that; there are almost always ways to beat bad
weather. With him in the cockpit was Capt.
Robert Patchett, serving as the flight's first
officer and co-pilot. In the cabin were four
longtime Northwest attendants, Barry Forbes,
Meg Miller, Dawn March and lead attendant
Nikki Ward. They were joined by a relatively new attendant, Doug O'Keeffe,
who at the last moment had swapped with a woman who was scheduled to
work the flight.
Flight 1829 took off three hours late. It was over southern Georgia, more than
halfway home, when a message flashed on the cockpit computer: "Detroit is
closed." The plane was eventually rerouted to Tampa, Fla., and landed at 8:03
p.m. local time.
To some passengers, the Tampa layover alone was
enough to make Flight 1829 the worst of their lives.
As they got off the plane, a Northwest ground agent
told them the plane would leave for Detroit the next
morning at 6:15. Passengers got vouchers for a St.
Petersburg hotel, but at that late hour, check-in took
ages. Northwest gave out dinner vouchers, but a
hastily prepared buffet was swamped by more than
200 passengers from Flight 1829 and other
sidetracked flights, and many went away hungry.
Doug Post, 29, a developer in Kalamazoo, Mich., was
one of them. Mr. Post had been in St. Martin on his
honeymoon with bride Dawn Chamberlain. They
were already feeling put out; their St. Martin hotel
room had been infested with cockroaches.
They crashed around midnight. When their wake up call came at 4:30 a.m.
Sunday, they hurried to the airport -- and eventually learned that Flight 1829's
crew wouldn't be legal to fly until midday. Union and Federal Aviation
Administration rules require a set amount of rest after a certain amount of time
in the air; crew members were back at the hotel snoozing.
The flight crew had tried to alert passengers to the
change Saturday night, but didn't get word to many.
Mr. Post milled around with about 40 Flight 1829
passengers at the airport before dawn. They fumed
as they couldn't get a straight answer about when the
flight would leave. Finally, Mr. Post lay down on the
airport floor and slept for four hours.
The crew threaded through some of those seething
passengers when it arrived at the airport shortly after
11 a.m. The crew had been joined by Chuck Miller,
an off-duty Northwest 757 captain who lives in St.
Petersburg and wanted to hitch a ride in the cockpit
jumpseat. Capt. Miller was toting his cell phone.
They expected an uneventful flight. Capt. Stabler
thought the storm had blown through, and he assumed Detroit was open since
he had been given the go-ahead to take off. In fact, Northwest's operations
center in St. Paul, Minn., the airline's headquarters, already had let a few planes
land in Detroit that morning.
Passengers began boarding Flight 1829. Additional travelers had joined the
flight, and now every one of the plane's 190 seats was taken. Some infants
rode on laps. Northwest catering personnel, figuring Flight 1829 needed only
enough food, drinks and ice for the two-hour hop from Tampa to Detroit,
ordered two extra beverage carts and big bags of peanut packets removed
from the plane.
The flight departed at 12:27 p.m. Passengers were served. In coach it was hot
sandwiches -- steak with onions and green peppers or turkey pastrami and
cheese. In the cockpit, a computer message flashed on screen an hour into the
flight: "Due to weather in Detroit, you can expect extensive ground delays."
Capt. Stabler wondered aloud about slowing down to give the airport more
time to get ready. "Go like hell," urged Capt. Patchett, the co-pilot. "Get there
in front of everybody else." They barreled on, and landed in Detroit at 2:45
Sunday afternoon. Nearly 24 hours had passed since the plane left St. Martin.
Some passengers applauded.
Michigan's Wayne County owns Detroit Metro Airport and is responsible for
snow plowing. Eleven inches had fallen at the airport since Saturday, but now
the sun was shining. Wind and jet exhaust whipped veils of snow across the
tarmac, but all in all, Capt. Stabler thought, "I've seen worse."
So what happened next seemed odd. The air-traffic
controllers told him to exit off the runway onto a
rarely used taxiway on the far-western edge of the
airport, away from the terminal. The taxiway is called
Zulu. There was a conga line of other planes already
there. At various times that day, that line and others
around the airport would include nearly 30 Northwest
flights.
From the right side of the plane, the passengers and
crew could plainly see the nearest gates, along the C
concourse, no more than 400 yards away.
**********************************
More in a minute.
Jon. |
