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my original itinerary for this weekend was to fly in to milwaukee via minneapolis on thursday and fly out to san jose via minneapolis on sunday, both flights on northwest airlines. i had no problem with the first half of my journey, in fact the flights were ahead of time. sure there was the annoying child behind me that was incessantly kicking my seat, and the fact that at minneapolis they boarded us 45 minutes before departure only to have us sit on the runway for another 25 minutes, but these are petty complaints in light of what happened to me last night.

my flight was scheduled to depart at 2:55pm, but it was slightly delayed until 3:11pm. we started boarding even later than that and after we boarded we were informed that the pilot was working with a mechanic to resolve a “mechanical failure”. eventually that was resolved and we appeared to entire the line for the runway. we sat there for a while longer and finally when we started moving again, they informed us that they had resolved a second, and related, “mechanical failure”. at this point, i was a bit nervous, i mean who wants to fly on a plane that’s having all these issues. we were cleared to take off though and since the problem was being addressed in the cockpit, i figured it was not anything significant.

so we finally take off around 5pm, nearly 2 hours after our scheduled departure time. of course, all the connections in minneapolis are broken at this point and the flight attendants are feeding us lines about rescheduling us onto later connections. i’m pretty tired at this point so i doze off, thinking something will work out in minneapolis. well, it turns out that while i was sleeping, the pilot turned the plane around. he made an announcement which woke me up and he indicated that there was a “mechanical failure” that would not allow them to proceed to minneapolis. we had been in the air for 20-30 minutes, essentially half way to our destination.

at this point, you could feel people’s fears in the plane. i was pretty nervous myself. what is this “mechanical failure” that keeps occurring and cannot be resolved? the plane began a rapid descent, so rapid in fact, that at one point the plane’s dropping speed made people pretty nauseated and frightened. it didn’t help that wisconsin/illinois were experiencing unusally windy weather which kept rocking the plane. the flight staff obviously stopped the drink service but made the situation worse by notifying us over the intercom that because the ride was too bumpy, they wouldn’t come and pick up our cups. this was about 5-7 minutes before touching down and now everyone seemed pretty horrified that we were going to have a very rough landing. i read the safety card on how to brace for rough landings and thought about a lot of things in my life during those 10 minutes before we touched down. thankfully, in spite of all the bumpyness and getting rocked by the wind, the pilots managed to put the plane on the ground reasonably well. i managed a sweat bath and i was just looking to get off the plane as soon as possible.

as it turned out, there were zero options to get me back to cali last night, so i had to opt for a super early flight this morning. i woke up at 4am, that’s 2am PST, hopped in the shower and headed out for the airport at 4:30am. my journey is to take me east to detroit, then on to san francisco. i’m sitting on the latter half of the journey and the flight was delayed in taking off becaues of a strong headwind. looks like i’ll be arriving around 11:50 am instead of 11:23am. i will have been up for more than 9 hours upon touching down, and i’ll have to go to work and school still. it’s gonna be a rough day but i’m looking forward to crashing tonight and getting lots and lots of sleep.