Emergency Landing (Rio Day 2)

February 20, 2009

After about 4 hours of sleep at the Airport Regency Hotel, I arrived at the Miami airport yet again. With nothing to do but wait for my 2p flight, I made friends with some of the other people on the ill-fated plane to Rio, including a very cute and helpful Brazilian guy. We finally boarded our plane and took off, amidst much clapping of the excited passengers.

(At this point, I would like to mention that although we never actually boarded the first two, this was the third, yes third, plane that was assigned by American Airlines for the flight from Miami to Rio.)

About an hour into our flight, the captain made an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen…” You see how annoying this becomes? It turns out that we had yet another mechanical failure and we would be turning around to make an emergency landing in Miami. The equipment used to monitor the other plane traffic in the air was not working an all. The captain informed us that this was an important safety feature needed for all planes flying into South America. Um, hello?! Isn’t this an important safety feature ALL the time? But I digress.

After landing (safely) in Miami, we all rushed over to the customer service desk to complain. This was indeed getting ridiculous. We were promised another plane that would be boarding as soon as they transferred our luggage but were slightly delayed by the passengers that decided to cancel their flights and go home. One passenger was heard to state, “this is a sign that I wasn’t meant to go to Rio!” I however had not just spent thousands of dollars and months planning to just go home – I was going to make it to Rio.

We took off around 6p and after a few hours of no announcements, I was able to relax enough to sleep. I woke up as we were landing in Rio, around 3:45a, almost 24 hours after our original scheduled arrival in Brazil.