A plane story's not funny without vomit, is it?
It was early January, 1991. My fabulously wealthy uncle had had some share options come in and had treated the family (11 of us covering three generations) to New Year in one of the Disneyworld resort hotels. To the 11-year-old version of myself, it was absolutely paradise. But you're not here to listen to my holiday stories.

The flight back was a 2-legged affair. Orlando to Charlotte and Charlotte to Gatwick. It remains painfully etched into the memory of every member of the Ousgg clan since.

4:30pm, Atlantic time. We took off from Orlando in a Boeing 737. Through a fecking tropical storm. This meteorological abnormality, we found out later, had killed several people in Miami by dropping telegraph poles on them.

Now, being pre-teenaged, I wasn't exactly an experienced flyer, but I could sense something wrong when all the cabin crew abandoned giving us mints and sat down with their eyes closed and groaned. The take off can best be described as 2 mile-stretches of fuselage-trembling, engine-roaring terror as we climbed a thousand feet, interspersed with worrying intervals of silence as we plummetted back down about 500 of those feet.

5:30pm, Atlantic time. A harrowed pilot touches down in Charlotte and the flight crew are so keen to get out that they depressurise the cabin. IN ABOUT A SECOND AND A CUNTING HALF!!! When you depressurise so quickly, there are certain parts of people's body that object. Like stomachs. At least 75% of the people on board (including my father, grandad and both cousins) promptly vomited. The other 25% (including me) left the cabin as quickly as humanly possible to avoid the bilious attacks of around 120 people. Seriously, that's a hell of a lot of sick.

7:00pm, Atlantic time. After a couple of Cokes to recover (or, in some cases, to get the taste out of their mouths), we climbed aboard the Boeing 757 that would take us across the pond. The pilot looked to be comatose and spoke in an Alabama drawl - this was not an inspiration. Thankfully, the weather had calmed down.

8:30pm, Atlantic time. Intercom on: "Ahhh, ladies un gennelmen, we have something of a problem up heeeyah. It wud appeeyah that we have lost the powah from two of our engines, and are going to have to make an emergency stop in Nuu Yawk f'r while".

Initially, with the pilot's laconic tones, this didn't seem to be a problem. Until we thought about it...

...

...we were on a Boeing 757...

...

...Boeing 757s only have two engines!

This fact simultaneously slammed into the mind of many of the passengers about 5 seconds after the pilot clicked off the intercom. What followed was immediate and undisciplined chaos - people scrabbling for oxygen masks and lifebelts, screaming for their kids and cabin crew running up and down the aisles. Imagine the scene from Airplane! immediately after Julie Hagerty asks: "By the way, can anyone on board fly a plane?", only with the mournful absence of a gratuitous pair of tits, and you'd be somewhere close.

8:31pm, Atlantic time. Intercom on: "Ahh, ladies un gennelmen, ah apologise fer mah errah. We are apparently missin' onleh one engin'. We are not gonna crash-land. Repeat, we are not gonna crash-land".

Fucksocks! Not only do we have a Redneck of a pilot who DOESN'T KNOW HOW MANY ENGINES ARE ON HIS FUCKING PLANE, he is 'apparently' only missing one of them. Rather than viewing our stopover at JFK airport as a minor inconvenience, the passengers begin to see it as a welcome break. That is, until...

9:10pm, Atlantic time ...On the tarmac at JFK. "Ladies and gentlemen. It would appear that our left engine cannot be fixed. We will attempt to get you transferred to another plane as soon as possible. Meanwhile, ground control has requested that you do not leave the plane. There is no access to the airport terminals."

Bollocks...

1:20pm, Atlantic time

...Yes, I'll let you do the maths. This is over four hours later. Four fecking hours! For one-sixth of a day, they have left 200-odd passengers on the tarmac in a motionless and apparently useless Boeing 757. We are all over-heated, parched and grumpy. Eventually, we are shipped through a hastily-erected metal tunnel into another Boeing 757 with a different pilot (this at least is greeted with some relief). Finally, more than seven hours after leaving Charlotte, we (metaphorically) hit the Atlantic. Every single passenger gratefully and instantly falls asleep. I try to obtain a drink of water, but the cabin crew are also sleeping - unlike the pilot, they have had to bear the whole grisly experience too.

6:00am, Atlantic Time (1:00pm GMT) If you had a planeful of passengers who were physically and emotionally wrecked, and you knew that you wouldn't arrive at Gatwick for another three and-a-half hours, wouldn't you be inclined to let them sleep? Apparently our new pilot was a cheery morning person, and bing-bonged the plane with a cheery, corporate America, 'Good Morning' message. Several passengers told him in no uncertain language to piss off.

The one compensation from being roused from our reverie was the promise of breakfast. Eagerly, the mostly British passenger complement scanned their menu cards: soss, egg and beans! Smashing! This was something that even airline catering couldn't cock up.

Of course, there was a punchline. The only reason that we were able to get this plane at short notice (short? For fuck's sake?!) was because the hot-catering facility wasn't operating. Instead, bleary-eyed, no-longer-smiling stewardesses brought round our breakfast: one blueberry muffin.

A blueberry muffin. At 6am. Served to parched, weak and very tired people without the benefit of butter or hot coffee. Shit...

This muffin sat in the mouth like a lump of plastecine and on the stomach like a lump of lead, only without the incipient toxicity (well, maybe...). We barely had the energy to chew, let alone digest, and twenty minutes later, the same bleary-eyed, no-longer-smiling stewardesses came round and collected up 200 muffins, each one with a single bite taken out of it. From that day to this, no member of my family has been able to look a blueberry or a muffin in the eye.

Apologies for length, but it was more apology than we got from Pan-Am, who were responsible for the whole sorry farrago. They went bust later that year, which came as little surprise.
( ousgg is not seeking approval, Thu 29 May 2008, 17:44, Reply)