Lost in Fog - View form Zero Feet
Well, lost on the radar - or lost the radar to be exact. We boarded the plane, taxied half way to the runway and sat. Then we sat some more. Then the captain told us that a radar somewhere had gone down and we couldn't leave. So we taxed back to a plane parking lot and sat some more. Then we sat some more while they tried to re-route us over Spain. I'm not sure why we had to go over Spain when we were flying east to the US, but anyway, we enjoyed our breakfast at zero feet with a nice view of the Malaysia Air plane parked next door. We refueled (due to the longer flight time) and eventually took off, 4 hours late.
Of course, all this meant that we well and truly missed our connection to Haiti. Given my ticket and luggage troubles after my last missed connection, I might never get home. (Don't worry Mum - only joking - I should be home well before next June!). We ended up overnighting at a nice airport hotel in Miami.
Growing tickets
Speaking of tickets. At last count I think I have 3 tickets in the system. Since my missed connection in Vienna, the now familiar remark I get from airline ticketing staff is a slightly dismayed, "Oh, it's an around the world ticket", shortly followed by a puzzled "Uh, hmm, err, I'm not sure what they've done to this ticket". Supervisors are called, phone calls made and a lot of peering into monitors done. If I'm on the phone, then I'm on hold, rapidly chewing through the ten quid deposit I put on the line at reception. If I'm at the airport, I'm anxiously checking my watch, hoping I don't miss the flight.
Anyway, from what I can tell, when I missed my connection in Vienna, Royal Jordanian put me on the next flight which wasn't part of the ticket. This meant that they had to reissue the ticket from London onwards. Except they didn't do it correctly and didn't tell me they had issued a new ticket. Qantas didn't tell me about the new ticket when I called them a few days later to change some flights. Luckily my travel agent was on top of things and forwarded me the new ticket (now devoid of the changes I had made). Several phone calls to various airlines has me none the wiser, but with a growing collection of tickets and itineraries in the system.
In the end I just turned up at the airport hoping that at least my next leg to haiti would be OK. The very helpful American Airlines ticket person was able to sort some of the mess out, but couldn't complete the task as I had to check-in and catch the flight. As it turned out, with the delay we could have had 4 hours to get it done, though I'm not convinced that even this would have been long enough! As such, the last few legs still aren't 100% sorted yet. At this rate, I'll end up on a clapped out DC10 circling endlessly over the Gobi Desert!