Tarmac and Ice

Back online after an eight-day hiatus caused by some travel to very cold climes indeed. I'm now sitting in New Jersey in the relative warmth of 19 F, which on a more sensible scale is -7 Celsius. I have just escaped from Minnesota, where for my pains I was privileged to witness the coldest day of this year's winter at -8 F with a wind chill factor that brought it down to -17 F. Now, that translates to -27 Celsius. Let's spell that out: Minus twenty-seven degrees Celsius.

Back in Bombay I would have been basking in Plus twenty-seven degrees Celsius, a difference of 54 degrees.

My respect for Arctic and Antarctic explorers and mountaineers knows no bounds. My estimation of them as some of the daftest bravehearts to walk this planet is also confirmed.

Over the last week I've spent an unseemly number of hours in planes, airports and taxis. Also in taxi-ing planes at airports. And stationary non-taxi-ing planes, too.

My flight from Bombay boarded on time, pushed off from the gate then sat on the tarmac with an unspecified "technical fault" for 90 minutes. Not a very reassuring start to some serious globe trotting. However, we did take off uneventfully once the fault, whatever it was, had been fixed. I suspect it had something to do with the kitchen, judging from the inflight food, if one can dignify it with such a term.

On landing at Heathrow, we spent 45 minutes on the tarmac waiting for a gate. Since this was 50% less than the time spent at Bombay waiting outside a gate, it should be considered an improvement in service standards.

This was Saturday. Across the Atlantic the worst storm in living memory to hit the US eastern seaboard dumped 26 inches of snow in a few hours in New York. Naturally, since that was where I was headed next. (As a digression, what is it with this 26 inches figure? That was the amount of rain that Bombay received in July of 2005 in one night. And now New York does the 26 inch snowfall show.)

Saturday flights to New York were cancelled by the dozen, but since my flight was scheduled for Sunday, I feared not. More fool, I. We took off from London on Sunday on the dot, flapped across the Atlantic uneventfully, reached Newark airport on the dot, were granted a landing slot with no ado and touched down gracefully on the tarmac on the dot. Okay, I've given you enough dots for you to join them and figure out the magic word. Yes, tarmac!

We spent the next 3 hours (also reckoned as 180 minutes or 10800 seconds) sitting on the tarmac at Newark. Of course, this was in instalments of "a few minutes more", "just about five or six minutes to go", "momentarily" and similar reassurance-oriented lies. Apparently the plane ahead of us at the gate, an El Al airliner, had got stuck in the ice and couldn't be moved away from the gate. One would think that Newark airport with over a hundred gates around would have found us an alternative gate to spare, but it took them 2 hours (120 minutes or 7200 seconds) to do so. Some bright spark finally did get the idea after the 120th minute (or maybe union regulations prevented them from doing so any earlier) and they taxied us over to another gate. Alas, the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, as Robert Burns was wont to say. (Dunno why he couldn't speak the Queen's, but that could be because of those unnatural Scottish garments, kilts.)

At the new gate, we waited for another 1 hour (60 minutes or 3600 seconds) because the aerobridge was stuck in the ice and couldn't be extended out to meet our plane.

By this time, of course, the habitual restrained demeanour of four hundred odd passengers had melted (unlike the ice) and the air was thick with comments and suggestions being passed around. These ranged from exhortations to pop the chutes open and have us slide down to our old friend the tarmac (pretty daft considering it was minus umpteen Celsius outside and our butts would probably have frozen to the slide) to calls to pop open some of the bottles in the bar so we could all wet our whistles.

The crew on board being stoutly British passed the time by making announcements over the loudspeakers about how this kind of thing would never have happened in ol' Blighty. Strangely, all announcements were preceded by "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls" - they seemed to take their junior passengers very seriously.

My Monday trip to upstate New York was cancelled because flights refused to take off, but my Tuesday trip to Minnesota was on schedule. Of course, in their infinite wisdom when the airline cancelled my Monday flight they also cancelled my Tuesday reservation to Minnesota. I guess their reasoning went, "Since we cancelled Monday's flight and he couldn't travel on Monday, he wouldn't want to travel on Tuesday either, so though we'll have the flight take off, there's no point having him on it, so let's cancel his reservations all around. Tea, anyone?"

Modern American airports specialize in having fewer check-in staff around and in providing the passenger with the exciting activity of checking himself (or herself) in at a funky kiosk. So when the nearest kiosk cordially informed me that there was no way in hell it was going to check me in, I had to run around the airport to find something resembling a human being in authority that I could talk to. This turned out to be a short plump lady in spectacles and a beard who resembled a minor hobbit. The beard was a mere starter's edition, but impressive nonetheless for adorning the face of one of the fairer, less hirsute sex. However, Mama Hobbit turned out to be a godsend and far more impressive than appearances would portend. She tapped out some cryptic commands on a stone-age computer quicker than Neo dodging Agent Smith's virtual bullets and hey, presto! my reservations were reinstated.

Thankfully, that, so far, has been the last of the excitement as far as my air travel goes. Since then I've uneventfully negotiated a day trip to Chicago and a return to Newark.

Tomorrow it's London again and a few days later, Bombay. Let's see what the future brings.

BTW, tarmac is actually short for tarmacadam, a paving material of tar and broken stone, mixed in a factory and shaped during paving. Tarmacadam, in turn, is short for tar-penetration macadam, a type of highway pavement no longer commonly used. Tarmac was invented when E. Purnell Hooley was passing a tarworks in 1901. (A Eureka moment, presumably.) Or so I am credibly informed by Wikipedia. It is ironic that I have spent so much of my recent life on something that is no longer commonly used. Perhaps tarmac is really concrete. Not abstract.

The cold is addling my brain.