The general well-wishes for my trip back to Pocatello was that it not end up like my trip from Pocatello. What were the odds, right?

An early afternoon flight out of Houston was going to land me in Salt Lake at about 7. Add on top of that a 2-3 hour drive and I'd be home in time for bed. When I made the reservations, I was under the somewhat faulty assumption that the times given for the flights were, give or take thirty minutes, actually relevent.

It's a solid hour or so from Seabrook to Intercontinental. He dropped me off at the curb with a dollar to tip the guy who was going to take my bags. I found the curbside check-in and waited behind an Asian women. After about five minutes or so a couple of handlers came out and took care of her baggage.

Then, for twenty minutes, nothing. A line behind me was forming.

"Hey, are you with America West?" a Delta handler asked.

"Yeah."

"I'm pretty sure they went on break. They usually do about now."

After waiting a few more minutes, I decided to go ahead and save the dollar and take my own bags in. Though it turned out to be a very short walk and no inconvenience, it would have been nice if they'd put a sign out that they were going on break. Oh well.

I waited in line behind a guy who was headed to San Diego to strut his BBall stuff. I thought was odd because San Diego hasn't had a basketball team since the Rockets left, but it made for conversation. He was worried about getting to the plane on time. I pointed out that we had an hour.

How, I naively asked in an amnesiatic stupor, could anything go wrong?

The gate was easy to find and, due to the line at the counter and waiting for the on-break baggage handlers, it was boarding when I got there. When on the plane, three thoughts crossed my mind:

1. Ashtrays. Damn.
2. It's no good to be on a full flight with substandard air conditioning for thirty minutes.
3. Crap. Shouldn't we have taken off by now?

It was 3:15 when The Voice came on to say that we had a bit of a traffic jam. "A bit," I noticed. They always say "a bit" even when, as The Voice said, we were back twenty planes. I noticed that my layover was only forty minutes. There was no way I was going to make my connecting flight. I consoled myself that they'd likely have another flight from Phoenix to Salt Lake.

Foolish me. At that point, I thought at that point that I would make Phoenix.

An hour or so later, The Voice came on.

"I have some bad news..." If being stuck on the tarmac for over ninety-minutes doesn't qualify as 'bad news' I'm worried...

"... maintenance issues..." Yawn

"... we've lost half of our hydraulic fluid while we've beeen waiting out here..." Excuse me? Even the flight attendent said "Dear Lord."

"... sit tight... maintenance looking in to it..." Looking in to it? I'm sorry, did you just say looking in to it? We're spitting out hydraulic fluid!

"... may be able to take off shortly..." Now okay. I don't entirely know what hydraulic fluid in a plane does, but I do know that I heard the flight attendant say "Dear Lord" and if a flight attendant is not comfortable with it, then ashtrays are the least of this plane's problems.

"... if you miss any connecting flights, don't worry. America West will put you up for the night..." Liar, liar, pants on fiar.

It took maintenance roughly an hour to determine that an airplane that loses half its hydraulic fluid in half the amount of time it takes to plane to get from Point A to Point B ought not try to make that flight.

Three thoughts occured to me:
1. Three of my four flights have been delayed at least an hour due to maintenance issues.
2. The fourth was delayed even longer for other issues.
3. The lack of runway space they keep complaining about has saved us from first circling the Nevada sky and landing to refuel and now flying in a plane that's drooling hydraulic fluid faster than a Water World waterslide spits out water. So then the best thing that's happened to me with America West involves... delays.

When they finally let us deboard, they asked us to stick around for half-an-hour or so to see if they could fix the plane. Foolish, trusting mortal that I am, I believed them.

They, meanwhile, dropped the flight from their listings and immediately used the gate to start boarding for their next flight. Calling my folks I discovered that they'd even dropped it from the website. I suppose "Cancelled due to reasons death-trap related" might not look good. Better to pretend the flight never existed, which is exactly what their website would tell you if you looked.

Eventually I hooked up with a couple of other passengers and followed their lead. That was when I saw it: The Line.

Now the line was probably a fifth as long as it had been in Vegas. But the Vegas line was bendy-backy-forthy and therefore not nearly this intimidating. I managed to get in about three quarters the way back in the line.

That lasted half an hour. After half an hour they sent a ticket agent down the line asking us if we'd collected our baggage?

"They took our baggage off the plane?"

"That happens with all cancelled flights."

"Oh, so the flight is cancelled?"

"Oh, yeah, we don't reboard deplaned flights."

"So then why did they ask us to stick around for half an hour?"

She just kept walking.

Now the conversations generally went as followed:

"Honey, you go get the bags while we do nothing but wait here in line."

"But sweetie, we have six bags!"

"We don't want to lose our place in line, do we, sugarbumpkins?"

"But..."

"Go!"

Now since I was flying alone, I had no such option. I had to lose my place in line. Otherwise, there'd be no telling where my luggage would be by the time I got through the line.

The line may have been a fifth as long as it was in Vegas, but the intimidation was justified. The line crawled. Periodically, a ticket agent would walk up and down and ask "Is anyone here not here because of Flight 186?"

There were, by this point, two lines. The other line we were in seemed to be reserved for folks on Flight 186, which was our flight. The other line was for those who were scheduled for later flights. While we could have called these the 186 and non-186 lines, we settled for the "Actually Get To Fly" line and the "Never Going To Fly America West Again Anyway So Screw'em" line. It seemed more descript.

I suspect that most people that were not on Flight 186 either weren't paying attention or didn't say so because they feared that they would be told to get in line somewhere across the airport or equally inconvenient. But when people stepped forward and got into a separate that was about four people deep (instead of 100), they'd flag her down. Suddenly what she had to say seemed a lot more important.

It seemed that the only time we moved was when someone jumped lines. Three hours later when I looked back I saw that there were all of two people behind me. I could have spent the entire time in line at the bar and have been only a little further behind.

The next two flights to Phoenix had come and gone. There was only one AW flight left out to Vegas. The chances of getting out that day were slim-to-none. Turned out that Slim carried the day and I was set to go by way of Vegas. Unfortunately, that would have had me driving from Salt Lake to Pocatello from 2-5am. For someone that was mentally exhausted and is not good behind the wheel tired, that was not good.

I got a flight out the next morning at 6am. I spent an hour or so at the bar, drinking $5 Shiners talking to a guy who boasted playing baseball for the UH Cougars in the 70's.

That night, when I got home, I checked for messages on my phone. There were three:

1. Flight 186 to Phoenix was on time.
2. My flight from Phoenix to Salt Lake would be delayed and leaving out of a different gate.
3. Flight 186 to Phoenix has been cancelled.
America West Airlines
[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Epilogue]