Apparently, there are degrees of full.
I bring this up because I’ve spent a fair amount of time at airports the past few days. Flying to Montreal last week, the agent at the gate got on the intercom and asked people to check their carry-ons. The flight from DFW to Montreal was on a smaller plane, so they needed space in the overhead bins.
The employee at the counter turned on the microphone and started the same speech from that blog up top.
“We have a very full flight,” he opened. Then he stopped himself and said, “No, we have a completely full flight.”
I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m wrong. It turns out there is hierarchy of fullness:
“Full” might as well mean, “nearly empty.” It’s not as full as “very full,” which is then not as full as “completely full.”
That flight from DFW to Montreal was a new experience. Walking to my seat, I passed a woman in a Habs shirt. Then, two aisles behind her, two guys were making fun of Canadian accents, saying “Eh” to each other over and over again.
The flight home was not any degree of full. No one was sitting in the row in front of me, so when the woman in the aisle seat next to me sat down, I started nodding toward the empty seats to gently encourage her to move up and give us each a row to ourselves. She didn’t move, though. Obviously, she had a thing for me.
The pilot got on the intercom and said we weren’t hitting the headwind that was predicted, so we landed about an hour early.
“Oh, when will we get beyond these issues with the air traffic system?!” we all yelled out, reaching toward the sky.
To teach me a lesson about making light of Boeing’s problems, a vendor that works with flight planning software for Southwest, Delta, United, JetBlue and Alaska Airlines staged a glitch first thing in the morning on the day I went back to work.
Update from @SouthwestAir: Ground stop lasted about 40 minutes because of a problem with a vendor that serves multiple airlines. Live report coming up on @KRLD. Most flights at Love Field are on time. pic.twitter.com/e3uv20Jq2v
— Alan Scaia (@scaia) April 1, 2019
This caused reporters to line up again at Love Field to accost people waiting for security to ask them how they feel about things. Southwest was telling people to check in and go through security. The glitch only lasted 40 minutes, so once it was fixed, Southwest was eager to start loading planes to get back on schedule.
This saga wasn’t all bad, though. Because of the computer glitch, the issue with mechanics pulling planes for emergency maintenance and that separate computer glitch in February, I now have an extensive library of pictures of people checking in for flights at Love Field:
