Rides by Plane

Posted on May 4, 2010 in Travel - Conferences

How American Airlines assigns you your seating group number baffles me. It is an important enumeration when it comes to the moment when you take your seat, but I cannot see how it is derived. All I know is that after all the first class passengers, the priority passengers, the other kind of priority passengers, and the guy who winked at the gatekeeper just right, I was allowed to board in Group 3 going one way and Group 2 on the way back. None of this efficient “board by your seat number” that other airlines use: you looked at your ticket and got on board with your designated peers. These might be seated in the very back of the plane or the front; by the windows or along the aisles. Unless you happened to be traveling with a lover or a friend or a business associate, you found your place alone.

During the boarding, I arrived after the man occupying the middle seat had taken his place. Then, in Group 4, came the woman who sat in the window seat. One would have expected in a cunning design that she would have been on first, but American Airlines saw it fit that the two of us who had superior rankings get up and allow her to alight on her cushion for the four hour ride. Traffic in the aisle stopped so we could make room for her and then resumed when we were finished. When all the groups had been assigned, the doors shut and the pilot took us to Chicago.

The plane shook as we came down over the wooded plains to the west of the city. A fellow in a seat ahead and to the right of mine did not take the buffeting so well and I confess that I, too, was touched by nausea. The plane performed its perfunctory bounce of arrival and I thought “Well, that trial is over”.

But it wasn’t. Traffic controllers had had us touch down on the runway farthest from the terminals and at O’Hare, that was a long way. “We’re taking the tour,” one woman said to a friend on the telephone. Past the perimeter fence and a road just outside it we drove for ten minutes. The fellow who wanted to barf kept rubbing the back of his neck and taking deep breaths. “Pleeeeease God,” I murmured in a hedge of prayer, “please stop this ride before he blows.” When we finally arrived, the sick man bent forward, but he didn’t blow chow, yawn in technicolor, or talk to the air sickness bag. Everyone rushed out and we were all in Chicago, under a long greenhouse stretching to curbside.

On the way back, the plane raced across the continent. Upon leaving O’Hare, we were told that we had already shaven ten minutes off our flight time. When we set down, we were a full thirty five minutes early. I called Lynn to tell her that I was on the ground. It caught her by surprise: she was unpacking groceries. “Come as soon as you can,” I said, then hung up. “Oh,” I said when she answered the phone the second time I called “Don’t look for me in the baggage claim. I will come to the curb.”

Quite a crowd clustered along the street. Arrivals dropped their bags on the sidewalks and bent their necks to stare at the gutter as they watched the time they had gained in the air go to waste on the ground.