I think I will continue with a few other small incidents that I remember from past years. Today, the subject is air travel.

Like most of you, I cannot even begin to think of how many airplanes I have traveled on. Many hundreds, I am sure. And most of them aren’t particularly memorable. But a few of them were.

(1) Port-au-Prince to Cap Hatien, Haiti, February 1977. It was our delayed honeymoon, a week or so in Baby Doc Duvalier’s poor, but very very safe, Haiti. After several days in the capital, we were to fly to the north of the country and its historic capital. We were surprised when we wound up at the airport (if in fact, it was an airport) to find out that we were flying on a single engine, eight passenger plane and that there were to be nine passengers. I don’t recall the airline, but the pilot looked very un-Haitian. He was probably about 25, had blond hair and blue eyes, and was very good looking. There was no co-pilot. He told us that he needed to assign us seating to balance out the plane, and he began to point to us one by one and tell us what seat we should sit in. Soon, the eight seats were filled. I had my assignment. But Edie had not been given a seat. Our pilot then looked at her, smiled, and said, “you will sit with me and be my copilot”. Hmmm, I thought. What a honeymoon.

(2) Kennedy Airport, NYC, to Madrid, May 1972.

I had just left my job with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and was about, on June 1, to start my new career as a private attorney, and I thought a month in Spain and Portugal would be a good way to bridge those two positions. I was flying by myself and was to meet a friend in Madrid for the first several days, our vacations overlapping, and we were to meet at American Express at a set time. I had never been to Spain, and was very excited, as I took my seat. It was of course an overnight flight, and the plane took off without incident. We had a steward, rather than a stewardess, which was somewhat unusual in those days, and he had given us the normal safety message, and was telling us what a wonderful flight we were going to have, what films we could watch, and what we were going to have both for dinner and then for breakfast. Finishing his speech, which he gave through a microphone at the front of the coach section, and without missing a beat, he then said: “But first, we have to return to New York because one of our engines is on fire.”

This was not exactly what you wanted to hear, and you could see flames coming from the engine on the wing opposite where I was sitting. The steward, very calmly told us that, we in fact were not going to head directly back to New York, because first we were going to fly in several circles as we had to dump excess fuel into the ocean. The dumping and the flight back seemed to take forever, we did not get our dinner, but everyone on the crowded plane seemed remarkably at ease. When we landed, I remember we landed on some sort of foam that had been spread on the runway, and we were surrounded by fire equipment. I don’t remember anything special about the landing itself, and I think we exited the plane through the regular doors and our luggage was offloaded without a problem.

It was a long wait until another plane was ready to take us to Madrid. I lost a day of the trip. And of course, I could not meet my friend at American Express at the scheduled time. By quirk, however, I did meet him the next day. Not at American Express, but just wandering down a street.

(3) DC to Greenville SC, 198?. It was a routine business trip. I was heading down to Greenville for the day (or maybe it was overnight; I don’t remember), where I had a long time client. The flight left National Airport and all was fine. Until we got in the air, and the cabin started filling with smoke. A lot of smoke. Was it a fire? Was it poison? No one, including the crew members, had any idea. Having taken off from National, we landed in about 15 minutes at Dulles. The plane was cleared, and it turned out that there had been some sort of cleaning powder left in a duct. We were able to take off after a relatively short wait.

(4) Shannon Airport, Ireland to Toronto, ONT, probably about 1990. We were returning from a wonderful trip through Ireland. Our flight was on Air Canada, with a stop at Toronto before coming back to DC. What could be easier? The first thing that happened is that, waiting at Shannon for a late night flight, the flight was delayed for reasons that were unclear and we were eventually told that there was a mechanical problem, and that another plane (currently in Glasgow) would be sent to ferry us to Canada, but that there would be an additional wait of several hours. It was by now the middle of the night, and we were stuck at Shannon. For those of you who have been to Shannon, you are probably thinking that there are worse places, because Shannon has so much shopping and so many restaurants that we would all be well entertained. What we learned, though, is that all those shops and restaurants close at night, and there is nothing at all to do at Shannon, waiting for a boarding call that could come at any time.

When the plane finally arrived and, worn out we were escorted on, we knew that we had probably missed our connecting flight and wondered how Air Canada was going to take care of us. We landed in Toronto, went through Canadian customs (I think we had to do that), and then went into the baggage claim room. It was, once again, the middle of the night, but at least the hard part of the trip was over, right?

Wrong. We (the hundreds on our plane) mulled around the baggage claim for over an hour, with no baggage, and with not a single message about the delay. It was like we had been forgotten and abandoned. Finally, we were told that the delay was because the door opening the baggage department on the plane had jammed, and it took them that long to figure out how to get in. It was now maybe 3 a.m., or something like that, and no one knew what to do. We were told to go to a certain gate and that we would be taken care of. At that gate, there was one Air Canada representative, and hundreds of passengers. It probably took us more than another hour (maybe much more) before they told us when our connecting flight would leave the next day, and that they had food, taxi and hotel vouchers for us.

As you probably know, Toronto is not a small city, and metropolitan Toronto is enormous. We expected when we got into a taxi that we would be driven to a nearby airport hotel, but no. As I recall, the ride was over 45 minutes to the other side of town, and the next morning heading back to the airport was even longer because at that time there were other cars on the road.

For the amount of time it took us to get home from Ireland, we could have returned home form Bora Bora.

(5) Moscow to DC, January 1974. I should tell you my best plane ride, I think, at this point. It was getting on a PanAm flight in Moscow after a week in the Soviet Union. The food in the USSR was so bad in January 1974, that the chicken dinner we were served by PanAm was (and still in my memory is) the best meal I have ever had. You cannot imagine how tasty it was.

That’s it.