United puts passengers in military barracks in Goose Bay
Once upon a con, I waited for nearly 6 hours in Toronto while Canada’s Eastern attempted to roll up one working plane to send to Halifax. Little did I know that legendarily the union feud within Eastern was so bad that at one point pilot and co-pilot were not speaking to each other, but frostily involving ground control as an intermediary…
Well, I had booked on this airline, in the winter, and thus far 3 planes had failed…they’d roll em up, and send ’em back to the hangar. Finally to get our way belated flight off, they borrowed a plane from Canadian Air, and off we went.
Engine next to me sounded wonky. Lot of vibration. Our delay meant we weren’t going to make a storm-free entry into Halifax NS.
In fact, we reached Halifax and aborted 3 landings with bushel-sized chunks of snow breaking off our wings and flying back through the lights. I’m beginning to think, “People who’ve seen this sort of thing probably didn’t survive.”
We came around again. Terrible turbulence. Stew grabs a bullhorn and yells, “We’re going down…” And turbulence hit, throwing her up, and then down. Magazines from the seat pockets flew up and all over. Stew valiantly crawls up over a seatback with bullhorn in hand and finishes… “…in Monckton, New Brunswick.” General applause.
Our left engine still sounds sick. We’re tossing all over the sky. The dear lady next to me starts chattering about which doilys and silver and china she’s leaving to which kid…
We finally get there, park in the snow at the end of a long line of stranded airliners, and have no transport. We hike toward the distant lights of the terminal in the dark—I’m wearing strappy high-heeled sandals. Frozen. Absolutely. But that one light, like a distant star, guides us on.
We collapse, shivering, except one man does a total meltdown at the desk howling that his wife is waiting for him at Halifax. Uh, guy, we’re alive. Shut up.
Other people are being told they’re stuck here for a while. I brightly realize–I’m an INTERNATIONAL passenger, which gives me priority, and manage to claim a vacant seat on a morning flight.
We have no luggage. It finally arrives. We have to pull it loose from the iced-over cart, and it’s frozen shut. We do get a bus to a hotel. That’s the good news. The bad news? We no sooner get checked in than we all get calls saying the bus will be back in an hour and a half, which will be dawn, and they’ve put those of us with seats on the first flight out.
Didn’t even undress. Just ran warm water on my feet, flopped on the bedspread, and tried not to sleep through the wakeup call.
We got airborne, on an ice-cold plane with one side of the tires sorta frozen and thumpy, and the pilot saying to us all, “Belt in and hang on. We’re first out and we don’t know what we’re going to run into…”
We did get to Halifax, but that’s another story.
We were, at one point during the bouncing around, told that if we couldn’t land at Monckton, we’d have another chance at Goose Bay.
Reading the above, I can only say—I am very glad not to have been in a barracks in Goose Bay.
That’s a military airport, I’m surprised that Goose Bay even has 4 actual hotels and assorted B & Bs. And Labrador is just about as remote as it gets except for the high arctic. Mind you, it would have been better for the passengers if the plane had ended up in Resolute, NWT or some such place. When a big commercial jet stumbles into little arctic towns the locals turn out and billet the castaways on their spare beds, couches etc. They don’t have much, but the community hospitality is legendary. Goose Bay is the last long runway before you head out over the Atlantic and it used to be where they dumped off and arrested drunk and disorderly passengers. The current security paranoia and zero tolerance for such shenanigans magically cut off Goose Bay’s stopover trade. United should have been aware that it wasn’t precisely Club Med or anything.
My aircraft misadventures usually involved getting stuck for extra time in historical or tropical places so I can’t match you horror stories…although there was the time in February coming into Toronto during a blizzard where the plane tried to land on a closed runway and took an emergency go-round. I got a very up-close and personal aerial view of the big snowplows…
ISTR hearing about Goose Bay quite a lot when I was a kid, like it was the last North American stop on the trans-Atlantic route back in the days before jest could do it non-stop?
Arrghh! “jest” = “jets” 🙁 Please, can we have an editor?
CJ’s associates will not have to worry about snow when they land in Spokane for ShejiCon V this August. If any associates are interested please refer to the ShejiCon V Planning tab directly over the Wave Without a Shore banner above. We are starting to finalize plans so let us know if you plan to attend and what you’d like to do in Spokane between 15 and 19 August. An email address to send responses to is included in the instructions laced throughout the thread.
I don’t check in until August 16……
My fingers goofed. 16 Aug is correct. I’m arriving on 15th to make sure everything is proceeding as planned and to pick up a mini-van… Rental car agency with minivans isn’t open on Sunday…
Yow! I will say the accommodation in Monckton was first rate, if only I’d gotten to use that lovely bed. The sight of snow piled higher than the bus was quite impressive in first light. And the airline did get us out first thing. I wonder if there was not some such mess as we had at Monckton, because we were at the far, far end of parked transatlantic jumbo jets with our smaller plane. There wasn’t much light during the hike down that long parking lot, but I could see planes, huge planes, from all over the world, airlines I’d never heard of. If there was such a line of parked planes, they could well have run out of parking room at that airport, because it looked to us as if there wasn’t much space beyond us. So United may have had a choice of ‘no-choice’, given its mechanical problem. I think if I’d been on that plane, I’d a lot rather spend the night most anywhere rather than ditching in the ocean. So I sure don’t criticize the United pilot’s choice!
View of the snowplows would be right scary. All I could see was pine trees, big black ones, and snow coming off the wings, all in our lights.
I love Halifax, BTW. Been there twice, once in a howling blizzard and another time when I got to go out to a little inlet and see the famous Bay of Fundy tide roll in.
They say you can really bog down out there on the sand and it is, even with a modest tide, not a good thing to have happen.
It was quite cold, but it entailed a hike across a grass meadow and standing in wet grass. I took off my shoes and socks and suffered the cold.
Guess who had warm dry feet on the bus ride back?
Oh noes, not airplane stories! Not when I have to travel on several to get up there this year. XD
I got our flights through – I thought – AAA. Turned out their “travel partner” was – Yup, priceline, about the last place I’d use. I got notice a few weeks ago that our 1:30 pm flight from Spokane had been moved to 5:45 A.M. GRRRRRR.
Goose Bay? One could practice juggling small geese…goslings…and brush up on spaceship navigation and dinosaur reenactments! *<:o)
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!
Heheheh.
Need an in-flight movie? iTunes says it’s newly available, so it’s probably on other vendors now (Netflix, Amazon, etc.)
The Last Unicorn, the classic 80’s (?) animated film, is now available in digital release. I recall a few months ago, there was discussion of a special showing and praise for the book’s author. On iTunes, $15 in HD, $5 rental. Competitors’ pricing is probably about the same.
I believe that would be Peter S. Beagle who wrote “The Last Unicorn”. I have a DVD copy of it (legit!), but as I recall from watching it on HBO back in 1983, there were two versions of the movie. The differences were subtle, mostly I recall involving the skeleton guard.
50 years ago I was flying on a DC-6 in Mexico on a school trip to the Mayan ruins. My school mate in the window seat looked out and said, “We’ll have to drop like a rock to make the airport.”
As he said that the aircraft dove like a fighter.
And the stewardess screamed and started hauling herself to the back of the cabin grabbing the seat backs.
I’ve flown a lot on many different aircraft large and small but this was the only time I was grateful to land safely.
Lol—came in once like that at Brownsville TX, to meet my folks on Padre. I swear, I thought we were going to strafe the town. Dunno why that angle of approach, but we weren’t lumbering: we dived like a bat. I mean, like, guy, so you nearly missed the airport—can’t we go round again?
Once landed at LAX with a pilot I swear was ex-Navy, carrier trained. He flew the plane right onto the runway. This one was the smoothest landing I ever had. Most of them seem to get it real close then cut power to drop it on the concrete with a thud.
Ever fly into San Diego? One comes in low over a ridge to the east (fortunately that didn’t come out “eats” 😉 ) then flies low past a line of high-rises, from where one can look down at the planes “on approach”.
Ah, San Diego, where if you look down at exactly the right moment, you can see tire marks on the roofs of the apartment buildings on the glide slope 😀
I think every state has at least one or two airports that are not very user-friendly, but are there for expediency, or grandfathered in, or were a private field that went public, or… Flying in and out of Molokai is frequently bumpy; the runway is too small for anything bigger than a DC-3 or tiny private jet, and the pilots are usually trying to build or maintain their hours so they can be hired by one of the large airlines. Flights are usually scenic, but the up and down drafts on the most fuel efficient routes mean the planes are shaken, not stirred!
And we do not discuss the ferry ride! XP
Ah, Molokai–the Hawaiian island without a caldera, and an “interesting” ocean floor to the north. 😉
Yeah, most of Molokai’s caldera is in that ‘interesting’ ocean floor slump, although there are still remnants of it along the high sea cliffs. I’m not sure you could count the tiny volcanic cone on the Kalaupapa peninsula as a caldera; Kalaupapa itself was the last gasp of vulcanism on Molokai.
Kalaupapa actually has its own tiny airport, just as bumpy as the ‘main’ one up top. One of our friends used to work for the airline that served Kalaupapa, and he told me about the time one of their pilots misjudged runway conditions. He landed hard enough to blow out both of the plane’s tires, and had to wait until another plane could deliver replacements — and a mechanic to replace them. I don’t know how much longer that pilot worked for that airline, but it doesn’t matter, because less than a year later, the airline decided to pull completely out of Hawaii. Tough market.
Yes, I was stationed in San Diego between 1988 – 1991, as well as having been sent to school there twice before….my first time flying in to San Diego, we were fortunate that the wind was from the east, so we came in over Point Loma from the ocean. When my ex- and I flew in, we came in over the city and she was NOT happy seeing buildings outside the windows of the plane…..I remember the time there was a collision between a general aviation (read: private aircraft) and an airliner over North Park…..that was a mess…..
San Diego was itching to get the Navy out of Naval Air Station Miramar (where they filmed part of “Top Gun”) so they could lay claim to it and move the airport out of the downtown area. The Navy gave it over to the Marine Corps, so it’s now MCAS Miramar. I worked on the Naval Training Center, which was right under the takeoff path of the planes from Lindbergh Field as they’d go west…..back in the late 70s and early 80s, the 727s were louder than the DC10s and L-1011s.
Where is it in the Caribbean, St. Barts, I believe, that has such a short runway……..
Worst experience was taking off in a 727 in St. Louis, MO. The plane was extremely heavy, and the pilot used almost every bit of the runway. When he finally lifted us off the tarmac, the white stripes that indicate the end of the runway flashed under us a couple of seconds later, and he had the landing gear retracting as soon as he was off the tarmac……I didn’t think we were ever going to get out of that climb….
That mid-air collision, yeah. I flew that airline a week or so later, into Burbank; we had to go around; there were a lot of remarks about Cessnas. And the flight attendants had a minute of silence for the people who died.
On December 7, 1987, PSA Flight 1771, bound from Los Angeles International Airport to San Francisco International Airport, was cruising above the central California coast when it suddenly entered a high-speed nosedive and crashed on a cattle ranch near the small town of Cayucos. Investigations determined that a disgruntled USAir employee, recently fired for theft, had armed himself and boarded the flight, which was carrying his former supervisor. After writing a suicide note on an air sickness bag, the man shot his ex-supervisor, both pilots and then himself, causing the airplane to crash. All 43 aboard the ill-fated jetliner — 38 passengers and 5 crew members — perished.
That day, at the same time, I was on a United flight LAX-SFO then SFO-MFR (Medford, OR) to attend my mother’s funeral service. Not a word was said aboard, though I rather believe the flight crew had to have known. When I got home my next door neighbor told me they weren’t sure I was coming home, because they didn’t know what flight I was on. There was an hour plus layover in SFO, all I was taking was a backpack for a few days stay, no checked baggage to deal with, so I had called around to try and find another “commuter” flight that would cut the layover time. They all kept about the same schedule, so I left the ticket with United. It coulda been me! 😮
Wow.
Cuzco, Peru is exciting. they have to circle to get above, or on the other hand below, the surrounding peaks.
I hear Denver can be a bit of a thrill ride, with surrounding mountains providing some interesting wind shear. The only screaming dive and smackdown landing I can personally recall was coming into Camaguay (Cuba). I don’t think it was due to an ex-fighter pilot (though it was an Air Cubana flight so ’twas possible), just that though Ignacio Agramonte is technically an international airport, I don’t think its very big and they don’t get many large jets. It was the middle of the night and dark as the inside of a dog, so the experience was especially unnerving. [Hmmm… would being able to see the ground rushing toward you have been preferable?]
I can recall a Denver two-bounce landing, where the pilot came on the PA and said, “Sorry about that, folks, but we still had runway left.”
Across the aisle, the blonde (forgive me, she was) reading Rodeo Queen magazine and chewing gum like a cud just looked up and blinked. The Air Force Academy cadet one seat up crossed himself….
I remember flying into Sydney for the first time ever. We came down lower and lower, and it was just past sunrise, so everything was getting lighter but it was still hard to see details on the ground, and I could see all this water. And we kept getting closer and closer to it and I was thinking “Um, is there a run way somewhere around here or are we all going for a morning swim in the bay???”
San Franciso on the return was rather like Sydney. XD
And we’ve have a few Captain Kangaroo landings too, lol. Oh, and the turbulence! The connecting flight between Melbourne and Launceston (over the Bass Strait, which isn’t the smoothest ride ever) suddenly dropped about ten feet and slid over half a plane width. I was pretty sure I was going to have to reorganize my internal organs after that one.
The worst I’ve had wasn’t the one flying through storms between Houston and LaGuardia, but the one flying from LAX to Albuquerque. Clear-air turbulence as we crossed the coast near Newport Beach: I grabbed the arms and was very, very glad for the seat belt.
The first liar doesn’t have a chance around here! 😀
A couple years ago I was on my least-favorite flight in the inventory–the 14 hour, 45 minute United flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong (though it’s not as if UA has a lock on that route, it’s the only airline on which I’ve flown it–all 27 times). The drink cart and one each petite flight attendant were right beside me when we hit clear air turbulence, no warning. Both cart and stew achieved a hover out of ground effect, about 2 feet elevation, then crashed back down, fortunately in the aisle. I was able to guide her arrival enough to keep her out of the cheap seats (I always keep the belt on except when actually out of my seat). She remembered her training: she knelt in the aisle, hooked one arm under my near arm rest and with the other grabbed the rail of the cart. Next bump she stayed down but the cart one-hopped it, so I got a hand on it and it stayed down the the rest of the rodeo. The flight attendant was quite appreciative–she kept me well lubricated in Black Label for the rest of the ride. 😉
BRavo! I was on a transoceanic that dropped like that. You got Black Label. We got orange juice dripping off the overhead. Guy behind me was knocked unconscious for several minutes.
I asked a stew once how big a drop that actually represents. She said actually several hundred feet.
Worst drop I ever encountered was on a Los Angeles to San Jose flight that didn’t land in San Jose due to weather but proceeded on to Reno, NV. Coming past the mountains surrounding Reno, the puddle jumper flight I was on lost several hundred feet bouncing the flight attendants against their shoulder belts (at least they were belted in), Everyone seemed to have bruises from the belts, armrests, etc. that evening, and the bar directly across from the gate in Reno had a bang up business from deplaning passengers. A group of 20 Army personnel traveling to a contractor facility were on board, and after that wild ride had to get back on a flight to the San Jose area (our final destination), We ended up landing in Oakland and had to take a bus to San Jose where we picked up our rental cars and drove on to our final destination. It would have taken less time and cost less if we had driven rental cars from LA.
I don’t have any horror stories and for those who don’t know SYD it can be quite disconcerting coming in first thing in the am with nothing but water around you. The runway is out into Botany Bay.
Salida CO is interesting because one end of the runway is quite a bit higher than the other. You land uphill and take off downhill. When landing it looks like you are going to hit the runway with the nose – you need a very, very short roll to slow down. Taking off you get up as much speed as possible and fly off the downhill end watching the incinerator chimneys go by your windows once you’re airborne. Then there is the long, slow, circle around the valley to gain altitude to get over the range. Salida is over 7000 ft (2100m), not the highest in CO which I believe is Leadville.
I don’t remember the scenery the one time I flew into SYD (12 hour flight on a redeye), but it sounds like the ‘reef runway’ at Honolulu International. That one and Kailua-Kona are long enough to accommodate the Space Shuttle, and were marked as alternates/emergency landing sites while the Shuttle was flying.