Tour of the eastern seaboard airports

Saturday June 14th

We landed in Atlanta pretty much on time. It was a fairly easy flight, no entertainment, so sleep was actually quite easy.

Even though I was flying straight through to Dublin I still had to do the immigration checks, I was using an internal flight on the way. They were fairly simple though, except for giving a fingerprint it was no more difficult than anyone else. The conversation with the guy in immigration was interesting. He asked for my address, I gave it, and he then says, "Oh Malahide, that's a really nice seaside place, I like it". Yep, he had been there, he said he worked in Dublin (I took this to mean the immigration pre-clearance there), and used to have to go to Ballsbridge as well. He was even able to give me the result of the Lisbon referendum, although even the US papers ended up covering that.

I had 4 hours in Atlanta, and its a nice airport, fairly large, but easy enough to move around. I'd a McDonalds breakfast in one of the most efficient McDonalds I have ever seen, and looked at all the planes taking off. However its not really a plane spotters dream, all the planes are Delta. I refused to pay 35 cents a minute for Internet, mostly because the previous day I had paid 35 cents for 30 minutes.

The second plane, an internal flight to JFK via Dulles, was quite late departing (prompting a quick lunch stop in Seattle Coffee Co - not Starbucks). I may have contributed slightly to the 1 hour 40 minutes delay (maybe 5 minutes) as my mobile phone, or cell as they call it here, fell out of my pocket as we were sitting waiting to board and I had to run back from the plane to get it before it caused a security alert. The flight was a bit bumpy, it was a reasonable sized jet (76 seater), but one of those with engines at the back. For some reason I always feel these are less stable in flight.

We landed in Washington, and again had to get off and reboard for security reasons. We then sat on the runway for another hour due to some of the worst rain I have seen on the trip (and remember I've been to rainforests). The visibility was pretty much zero it was so heavy, and when the lightning came the baggage handlers and refuelrs had to abandon us to seek shelter. Even when the rain cleared we were told we still had to wait because rain in New York had shut down JFK.

Due to all the delays I only had 2 hours in JFK instead of the 5 I had been expecting. This should still have been enough to do the transfer except for the fact that I decided to have dinner in Burger King, for speed, only to discover the slowest BK in the world. They had no systems in place to ensure that orders were being met, unlike the ones in the McDonalds in Atlanta earlier.

Anyway I needn't have worried. As was the standard for the day there were more delays, getting the plane from the hanger to the gate, so we were an hour late getting on the plane. Then the real delay started. It began to rain, and this rain was the worst rain I had seen on the trip (and remember I've been to Dulles). We then had another 2 hours on the stand waiting, all the while with a fuel pump attached, while the weather was deemed too dangerous for the refueling to continue. Nice. And the baggage handling was constantly on again off again as the lightning continued. And even when it all stopped it took another hour to get the refuelling sorted out.

This would have been pretty annoying, but at least this 757 had a decent entertainment system, unlike its sister plane which flies to the poorer continent. I watched all the TV available, but the films just weren't very good, so then I had to move onto the games. Even when we moved off the stand, all that happened was that we joined a queue of over 60 planes waiting to take off. It took 2 more hours to take off.

And if that wasn't enough, we had turbulence after take off, which meant sleeping wa difficult, and dinner ended up at 3am. This is compared to 9pm which it should have been. Thankfully I had gone to Burger King after all, there were people around me who were beginning to get quite hungry. However evertnually this was over and we got a small amount of sleep, before we were woken for breakfast.