when it rains. it pours... and hails!

I never talk about work on here, but last week's adventure is worth repeating. But it's a LONG STORY!!

Friday, June 12th was supposed to be a normal, excruciatingly long but normal, day. A 12 hour day with 4 flights. It also didn't help that Thursday night's overnight was cut 2 hours shorter.

This is how it was SUPPOSED to go down...

*Seattle 8:50am - Denver 12:25pm
*Denver 1:20pm - Kansas City 3:50pm
*Kansas City 4:30pm - Denver 5:20pm (wait for 2 hours)
*Denver 7:10pm - Kansas City 9:45pm (overnight in KC)

Yuck right? Yeah, it didn't even happen that way. Here is the real day...

*Seattle 8:50am - Denver 12:25pm
*Denver 1:20pm - Kansas City 3:50pm
*Kansas City 4:30pm - PUEBLO, COLORADO!! 5:45pm

OK. So we didn't make it to Denver. The weather, hail, rain, thunder, lightning and such closed the whole airport.

-So, after 1 hour in a divert situation you give out water.
-After 2 hours you break out the emergency divert kit, ie. granola bars.
-After 3 hours, due to the new passengers-stranded-on-planes-for-hours law, the airline gets fined per passenger still remaining in the plane. We are talking about over $20,000 per passenger. And in Pueblo there were 4 Frontier planes so it would cost us about $3.7 million per plane!

Our amazing pilots got us off the ground with 15 minutes to spare. I felt like we were racing against the clock in some action movie. More tiring than exciting though.

*Pueblo 8:28pm - Denver 9:07pm

At this point we had no idea if we were still going to Kansas City for our overnight or not. Where is our plane? How late are we going to be? Won't this be too long of a day if we go?

We found our gate, plane, passengers to head right back to Kansas City. We boarded and headed out into the outrageous line of planes. We drove around for an hour, still waiting in line, and finally the captain told us we were 4th in line and to be seated for take-off. About 5 minutes later his next announcement went something like this...

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are number 2 for departure, but we just got a call from operations and they said your crew timed out for the day."

You should have heard the passengers grumbling. I just sat on the jumpseat and cried. If we had taken off it would have made it a 16 hour day and that is illegal for us. I was so tired I could barely walk or talk and I felt so aweful for the passengers since they had been waiting for us and now who knows when they were going.

So our last "flight" of the day was just driving around the tarmacs and runways of Denver International Airport.

*Denver 10:15pm - DENVER 11:22pm!!

It was too brutal of a day. But the best part was that once we got to Kansas City we were supposed to do a Cancun turn back to Kansas City the next day, well we got the rest of the weekend off since our day had been too long we couldn't go back to KC.

Tony and I had an entire Saturday off together and even got to go to a party down the street that some neighbors had!

We had to come back on Sunday for a Jackson Hole turn. And if you know me at all I would go and see the Grand Tetons any day of the week. I brought my camera and we all walked around the plane to take in the spectacular sight.

So all in all one rough day turned into a great weekend and I guess it's kinda cool that I got to experience my first divert. I just don't want to do it again EVER!