How not to fly…

I’m sitting on JetBlue Flight 321 from Dulles to Oakland. It was supposed to take off almost 4 hours ago but is still grounded. Luckily they didn’t pull back from the gate, so we’re able to go in and out of the terminal. Some Domino’s showed up after 3 hours, with drink and snacks in the terminal and on the plane after about an hour.

According to the JetBlue Passenger’s Bill of Rights I’ll get a voucher for my entire one-way fare. I already got one of these back in January when they canceled my flights after a huge ice storm. I understand that they are trying to do something better here, but twice in 3 flights is completely unacceptable - the ice storm I could have understood, but this was a stupid little part and they should have had one on hand. I don’t care about the money, I would have much rather been told the real time estimate for the part to arrive from NY JFK and have gone back to a hotel for the night.

Oh yeh, the best part - we’re waiting for a piece of hardware that is needed to fix the pilot’s seatbelt. We can’t take off until then. About 3.5 hours ago, United Airlines was able to lend them the actual seat belt which broke during the last flight. They then had us board the plane, only to realize they were missing some other little doo-dad. Worst part - a previous group of people had been on this plane and were deplaned and given the original equipment we were supposed to take. We then got the dud plane with few apologies. As in January, there were few updates without asking though the pilots were really nice and the ground staff got us the pizza on their own from off site (security was almost closed and they made it right in time).

One saving grace - I have Cingular’s 3G service on my D620. Cingular finally upgraded the towers near Dulles so it has true 3G instead of EDGE (how you role out a service without covering all major airports I have no idea). I’m sort of entertained thanks to the internet and there is power in the terminal so I don’t have to worry about power issues. I’ve been catching up on The Black Donnellys which took over the Studio 60 tv spot only to be moved to the web (exclusively shown on nbc.com now as far as I know). No idea if it’ll be back, though the end of the season was awesome - check it out!

[note: a baby just started crying]