Opinion

OPINION | GARY SMITH: Who knew landing wasn't the most challenging part of air travel?

Getting off plane sometimes the longest part of the trip

I have a Christmas story to tell. In the sense that "Die Hard" is a Christmas movie – namely that it took place at Christmas.

The Lovely Mrs. Smith and I, along with one of the progeny, her husband and her new baby, took a trip out of the country recently. It was fairly innocuous. The baby did great and we didn't get attacked by a crocodile (don't laugh: that actually happened to the self-same progeny on an earlier trip to the same general location. But, that's another story for another time and didn't actually involve blood.).

Things were concluding about as smoothly as could be hoped for when we arrived at a local airport whose name I'll not mention so I can exaggerate freely without risking any messy slander charges. That's when our plane pulled up at the gate, ready to disgorge all the vaguely happy travelers just glad to finally be home, only to discover that there was something wrong with the walkway. It couldn't get to the aircraft.

What happened next highlighted the human decision process. When faced with the dilemma, the person charged with actually getting us off the plane did what most of us do. He called in more people. Who all proceeded to start doing three different, largely unrelated things, not at all in concert with each other.

So, a process that normally takes about 10 minutes, tops, suddenly began to stretch into the 30- to 40-minute range while we sat and they wandered around in different directions, periodically coming back together then wandering off again. Which sounds pretty much like every meeting I've ever attended in my life.

Time, it seems, doesn't fly when you're done flying and just want off the plane. And so, despite the length of our trip, the longest leg of it seemed to be the part where we actually got off the aircraft.

I tend to take notes on my phone in the form of a text to myself during moments like this. And right about now, we've reached the point when, to steal a line, spellcheck seems to think I write "duck" a lot. I'm also beginning to offer suggestions out loud to my wife and immediate family, like, they should open the emergency exits and let us slide down that inflated slide, which would have the dual benefits of getting us off the plane and be kind of fun.

Now it's great to have your kids with you when you go places. But the best thing about the physical act of transporting small children is that, eventually, it ends. Except, when you're stuck in an airplane, it's nearly midnight and they've been flying a significant portion of the day on very little sleep.

There were a few infants on this plane, and we start to have a mini-me mutiny. Despite their many good qualities, children are the weakest link that controls that chain. And they were starting to jerk that chain for all it's worth. Which, to be honest, is merely an outward expression of what we're all feeling.

At this point, the pilot comes over the intercom to tell us that he "really has no idea what they're doing out there." This has the benefit of not really making us feel a lot better while meeting another very human need of the pilot, namely to make sure everyone knows that whatever is happening, it's not his fault.

While the captain is firmly washing his hands of the whole fiasco, the ground crew has decided to bring out one of those rolling stairway things that presidents are always falling on. However, apparently those aren't "one size fits all" (nothing actually is). The one they have can't quite make it to our plane door.

After abandoning that idea and beginning to move around in what looks like the old basketball three-man weave for a bit, the ground crew decided the pilot ought to maybe wiggle the plane sideways or something and they'd try the walkway again. And lo and behold, thanks to what is likely a Christmas miracle, it worked and we got off.

I'm not actually sure what the moral or point of this story is except that, well, you may have enjoyed the fruits of millions of dollars of technology and science, but it all comes down to three guys trying to get a ladder up to a door. Or, you can circumnavigate a not-small portion of the globe, but the greatest distance is the 10 feet between your plane and the walkway.

Or, all's well that ends with you in your own bed. Yeah, that's probably it.

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