From Reuters.com

Tarmac torture

By Chris Taylor

“You weren’t on that Cathay Pacific flight, were you?”

People have been asking me this question with a unique mix of sympathy and outright horror. And the answer is yes. The one that idled for 11 hours on the tarmac of New York’s JFK Airport, as we waited in vain for a gate. With two kids crawling over me, ages 2 and 5.

Yes, I was on that flight. And this is what it was like.

It was actually our second time boarding Flight 888, since the previous day, we’d been delayed until 1 a.m. and then sat on the Vancouver tarmac for three hours, until they finally sent us away at around 4 a.m. because of the blizzard in New York City. Frustrating, sure. But still within the bounds of human normalcy.

It was only the next day that things spun out into some kind of sadistic psychological experiment. My wife likened the experience to having slipped into Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. But I saw more of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, the existential classic where mismatched strangers are thrown together for eternity in a tightly enclosed space. As he wrote, “Hell is other people.”

We landed a little after 2 a.m. Tuesday, following another three hours on the Vancouver tarmac and another five hours in the air. I’m unlikely to ever forget the pilot’s pronouncements that followed. They reminded me of a Stephen King cover blurb for the bestselling book The Hot Zone, about a breakout of the killer Ebola virus. King said the first chapter was the most horrifying thing he had ever read – and then it kept getting worse. In our case, each time the pilot’s voice came over the intercom, things kept getting worse.