Fast And Furious

There is a lot to be said for our relative comfort level as human beings at the beginning of this new century. We like our coffee fast and our communication faster. We have begun to abbreviate our colloquialisms to allow more time to place them on our personal profiles. Getting a great meal in just seconds has become de rigeur in a world of microwave entrees. Express is the name of the game, and if you have more than ten items, you'll still probably try to sneak into the line because life is far too short to wait.
So you can imagine how the folks on Continental Express Flight 2816 felt when they were stranded on the runway in Rochester, Minnesota during the early morning hours of August 8. Severe thunderstorms forced air controllers to divert the plane south to Rochester, instead of Minneapolis, where it landed about 12:30 a.m. It received clearance to take off at 2 a.m., but the storms started again. At this point, the suggestion was made that they let all the passengers off the plane and onto a bus to take them to Minneapolis, eighty-five miles away. According to Mesaba Air Lines , a unit of Delta and the only ones with employees left at the Rochester airport, there were no buses to be had.
And so they sat, because no one from Mesaba wanted to be liable for these passengers "in a closed airport." And they sat. At 5 a.m., the flight got clearance again. But by then, its crew had worked more than the legal limit of hours. Another crew had to be flown in. Even though they had run out of food and the toilet was full, the passengers had to wait another hour until they were allowed into the terminal where they waited another two and a half hours to complete their trip to Minneapolis. It was 9:15 a.m. when the flight finally landed in the Twin Cities, full toilet and all.
It took a half a day to get from Houston, the original point of departure, to Minneapolis. More to the point, it took nine hours to go less than one hundred miles from Rochester to Minneapolis. In a very stinky plane. In spite of the largess of Continental, who issued each passenger a refund for the flight, a two hundred dollar travel voucher and a fifty dollar American Express Gift Card, I'm guessing there might be a few of those folks who would rather drive next time, since you can still roll down the windows in the family station wagon.