Thunderstorms and Staffing

Donna and I recently took a quick trip to Richmond, Virginia. If you have never been there it is a wonderful place full of history. You can visit Jamestown, Yorktown (last major battle of the American Revolution), many Civil war Battlefields and museums. On this trip we changed planes in Atlanta each way as there are no direct flights. On our trip back we ran into a semi-wild situation that we had never ran into ever before. Its another example of some of the situations you might run into in today’s somewhat broken world.

Our afternoon flight from Richmond to Atlanta actually left early an all went very well on that flight. We had a couple hours in Atlanta to burn so we went over to the very nice international terminal to get a bite to eat and relax in a less crowded area. As we sat and relaxed we could see storm clouds and lightning in the distance. I checked the weather radar and there was a nasty line of Thunderstorms moving towards Atlanta. It passed through and closed the airport for a little while. While it didn’t look like it would affect our flight it backed up the airport severe enough that air traffic control delayed our flight leaving Orlando to Atlanta to pick us up. Our flight was supposed to leave at 10pm but ended up being delayed four and a half hours. Our gate agent did everything she could to keep everyone’s spirit up by having trivia games and giving out small prizes. She also gave out some snacks for all of us. It was the first time I have seen an empty Atlanta Airport with just the cleaning crews and our flight passengers in the terminal. At around 1:20am our plane arrived and the gate crew let us know we would need to board fast since one of the pilots would time out if we did not. Airline crew are only allowed to work a certain amount of hours as stated by the FAA. As we started to board around 1:35am we found out how dire the situation was. If we did not take off by 2am they would cancel the flight since there were no backup pilots to take their place. Usually boarding is very slow but some people were taking it seriously and trying to move quickly. After everyone had boarded our gate agent who was the true hero of this situation rushed on to get people to sit down and to get the bags in the overhead bins. Before she was even off the plane the gate alarm was sounding stating they were about the pull it back. She hopped over to the gate, the door was closed and we got pushed back. It was around 1:47am at that time. We started the taxi and after some quiet and tense moments lifted off at 1:52am. We were eight minutes away from being stranded in Atlanta for the night. People started clapping knowing how close we were to not getting home. We got home at around 3am Central time after the heavy delays.

We had never dealt with a situation like this before but its something that is an issue now with the heavy staffing issues. I read an article about a pilot timing out on a flight from Athens to New York and they had to land in Iceland to change the crew out. You never know what you might encounter so always be ready. While this was an intense situation I still thoroughly enjoyed the trip and still encourage people to get out and travel but also be prepared and aware of what you might end up dealing with as you travel!