Share The Skies

If anyone has ever watched Gilligan’s Island and listened to the show’s theme song the song goes that a small group of tourists were going out on a boat for just a three hour tour, a three hour tour. But then the weather started getting rough and the tiny ship was tossed and if not for the fearless crew the minnow would be lost! Well in a way that is how I felt about my day on Asiana Airlines!

The day started off innocent enough, I left the hotel in good time, survived the cluster fuck that is the metro without much troubles and arrived in the airport with a good amount of time to relax. As I walked away from the ticket counter I saw a Chinese guy that had a t-shirt on that said “super proud of myself, always look up”. In a way that’s how I felt about myself, I’d (with the exception of the “tea festival” scam) survived the world’s largest city and lived to tell the story, damn I was good or as the Aussies say FIGJAM (fuck I’m good just ask me)! Things were looking awesome!!

And things were awesome until I saw everyone from my gate get up and suddenly leave. That was the first sign of trouble. They were not getting up to board the plane but were all leaving the gate!! WTF I thought, why was everyone getting up to leave? I walked up to the gate and the sign no longer read Asiana Flight 364 to Seoul Incheon but United Airlines to Chicago! Worst yet, there was no announcement or sign that told us what gate to go to. So I scurried toward a flight board and saw that my flight had been moved from gate 59 at the tail end of the airport to gate 223 at the other tail end of the giant mega airport. After about 10 minutes of hiking through the airport I finally arrived at the sign that said “GATE 223”, but it pointed down. So down I went with all the others to another floor, but we still had another floor to go. As we were approaching the bottom of the escalator I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the sign above us that read “NO COLLISION”! An appropriate sign as my day was about ready to collide straight on into delays and drama!

I arrived at the gate and sat down in a smoky hall expecting the flight to be called any moment. They said there’d been a ten-minute delay in boarding. No big deal!! So after ten minutes we boarded the buses to go out to the plane on the tarmac to what they call a “standing gate”. Everything was routine until it came time to push back.

The captain came over the loud speaker announcing there had been a delay due to heavy traffic at the airport. Understandable I thought since Shanghai is the largest city in the world plus after all China is known for its legendary traffic jams on its roads, so why not in the air. So, I barely gave it a thought. The flight time was only 90 minutes so we’d still be there in plenty of time once the traffic cleared.

But then things started to really get bad, 10 minutes went by, then 20, then 30, we were not getting any update. Then at about the 30-minute mark he said we were delayed again. This started to feel suspicious as other planes were going right by us and pushing back as we were still standing there. At this point I really started to question why I took Asiana especially with their blemished safety record from three years ago when they crashed upon landing in San Francisco due to pilot error. Supposedly the pilots were not very well trained on the manual tricky like landing at SFO (San Francisco) and the co-pilots somehow knew there was a problem but in a manner that is typical in Asia did not question authority but stayed quiet, therefore crashing on the runway at SFO killing two people (although I guess they were run over by the SFO Airport fire engine, so not sure if that counts in the fatality column against Asiana).

Just when things were not looking good a ray of hope appeared when the captain came on and said he’d just gotten the clearance from the control tower to push back!!! Finally some good news………but wait a minute…….no……no way did he just say……….we’d be pushing back in 90 minutes?  Sadly it was true, we were going to have to wait another hour and a half for the plane to just push back.

I spoke with the stewardess who was of ZERO use. She just looked at me with a sad Asian anime like face, said some things in broken Engrish (Asians can’t pronounce “l”, so it comes out as an “r”) and then got up, looked out the window and looked sad again :’( and walked off.

At last we finally pushed back after 4+ hours waiting. Just as the plane was pushing back a nice young guy came up to me and told me that supposedly every day the military holds air exercises and closes off the air space over Shanghai leading to mass delays. Knowing that this will happen airlines all jockey for position to get their space in line, so they don’t have to face these steep delays. It felt as if Asiana likely just sat back and let all the airlines eat up those few slots settling for being happy to simply sit on the Shanghai Pudong Airport runway and watch all the other airlines roll right by them!

Once we landed in Seoul I expected things to go smoothly, after all Incheon Airport is ranked best in the world. Nope! Not today! I ran into an entire buzz saw of Japanese waiting to clear immigration and waited about 45 minutes to get through.

My long day ended at The Incheon Airport Best Western Premier where I’m staying in a room where if I were about 3 inches taller I would be hitting my head on the ceiling. It’s odd here in Asia; the height of ceilings seems to be lower. Maybe it’s because people are smaller here? Maybe all the architects flunked spatial reasoning? Who knows, I’m just glad to have a place to relax and rest after such a day full of drama! Tomorrow I leave South Korea and on my way to up to Vladivostok, Russia!