So in the coming days I hope to give you a little taste of what I tasted, a sight of what I saw, a sound of what I heard and an itch of what I felt. And what better way to start it off than by telling you about the end of my journey.
My scheduled last day in Japan was supposed to be Saturday the 21st. I fly stand-by and Sunday's flights were growing tighter and tighter. I was pretty sure that I would make it out of Tokyo, but making it from Atlanta to Los Angeles seemed a little more questionable given the numbers. Monday's flights, on the other hand, were wide open for both legs with a whopping 100 seats open on the flight from Tokyo, while the 4 flights I could catch from ATL to LAX were sitting with around 20 seats open each. Given these facts I decided that if I was to have to spend an extra night somewhere I would prefer it to be in Tokyo rather than in Atlanta's airport (where I had slept the 1st of night of my vacation).
So I spent a wonderful extra night there full of lights, booze, dancing rock'a'billies and shopping, deciding to leave on Monday, March 23rd instead. Did anything big happen in Tokyo that morning?
One of my fellow travelers was half Japanese and had called her grandmother to say "goodbye" one last time. She came back to us saying something about "a fire on the runway?". We just shrugged and boarded our train to the airport from town.
Upon our arrival at Narita we noticed that a lot of flights read "delayed indefinite" next to their destinations.
"Hmmm", we thought. "That cannot be good".
After some more prodding we found out about the plane crash and slowly the fear began to sink in. You see, stand-by travel makes a strange bed fellow. She is good to you most of the time. 75% you get to take the flight you want to take, 20% of the time you have to adjust your departure by an hour or two or at most, a day...and the last 5% of the time? Well, you get royally fucked and since you are not a revenue passenger the airline has no obligation to help you out and you are up shit creek with a turd for a paddle.
"No reason to panic yet", I told myself. After all, no flights had been canceled, just delayed, indefinitely... There was no reason for any flight to be "canceled", right? Just horribly, horribly delayed? Eventually the airport would be up and running at a somewhat steady pace, if not a few hours behind?
Well turned out the jet had crashed on the main runway, the only runway big enough to handle fully loaded 747s. So yes a few planes were canceled, but my plane was a 777 and still light enough to take off from the other runway. We went back to the check in counter to find a sign that read.
"NRSAs (stand-bys) Please come back at 14:00". Panic started to creep up my legs. Turned out, had I left on Sunday as planned, I would have made it.
Time was closing in on the flight and yet no stand-bys were allowed to check in. We were told that we needed to wait for passengers from other planes that had been cancelled, which now included one to LA, one to Minneapolis and one to Detroit while having another U.S. flight scheduled for another day. I have been flying stand-by my whole life and one thing that I have learned is that if even one plane flying to the same country as you gets cancelled, you better find a comfortable airport bench to sleep on.
Finally, we were allowed to check in but we were told that they still could not give us seats and that we needed to wait until 14:35 before any more information would be given to us. 14:50 rolled around and still no word. I was drafting the email I would have to send to my boss explaining why I would not be returning to work, after I had purposefully delayed my arrival one day already. Certainly these were extenuating circumstances, right?
15:00 rolls around with the plane scheduled to leave in 30 minutes. My fellow non-revs and I banded together with pleasant chatter while secretly conspiring about who had the best priority. Finally my name was called and I got my seat and luckily, while I would have been happy sitting on the toilet for the 12 hour flight, I got a business class seat. My sister motioned me forward so as I would not miss the flight if they decided they needed to leave before all the passengers could board. I ran through security and down the hall to the gate, not even stopping for a short while to take a photo of Mos Def who was being accosted by several travelers with cameras.
I saw the gate and flew through the jetway, to find the plane...half empty. After another 20 minutes the rest of the stand-bys joined me, including the rest of my party. We drank champagne and smiled secret smiles of relief at each other from all corners of the plane.
Everyone was happy but weary, discussing the morning's fatal crash and how they had heard about it. One lady, whom had flown in from Hong Kong a few hours earlier, told me that they were told their delay was due to a maintenance issue, a move which I am sure was meant to quell panic amongst the passengers before it could start.
Well our plane taxied away from the gate and as we taxied away I looked out the window and snapped this photo:
Not the kind of thing you want to see before taking off.
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