You know when you get on a plane and you didn’t plan ahead, so you have to eat whatever weird snacks they drag up and down the aisle and sell for $6 a pop? There’s no healthy option, certainly, so you have to choose between biscotti and a plate of weird cheese cubes, and maybe, if you’re lucky, a sandwich of something only moderately gross, like almond butter and banana. Well, over the weekend a Virgin America flight full of passengers traveling from Los Angeles to New York found themselves stuck onboard for seven hours in the air and seven hours on the ground in Newburgh, New York, after having been diverted from the city as result of the storm.
During that fourteen-hour ordeal, the food slowly began to run out on the plane. (Presumably, the alcohol was all chugged by hour six.) By the end of it, flight attendants were doling out the last remaining snacks (Pringles, of course), giving each person a measly four potato chips. To add insult to injury, there was only a half-cup of water per person to wash down those salty, delicious pieces of fat and chemicals. And that doesn’t even take into account that there were three screaming babies and a pissed-off celebrity (Carrie Ann Inaba of Dancing With the Stars) onboard. That just might be the perfect storm of terrible onboard airplane conditions, minus maybe having to listen to an overly chipper flight crew or sitting next to a person who is exercising his or her right to not buy two seats even though really their ass occupies more than one.
But that wasn’t all. After waiting until midnight at a small airport in the middle of nowhere, the passengers were finally let off the plane and piled into buses, which drove them to JFK. While they were on the two-hour drive, air conditions finally cleared up and the Virgin airplane flew back, too, beating them there.
A 16-hour flightmare [NYP]
