Home again

There are many rules regarding air travel, and I am sure that they all have very good intent. But they DID make my flight five hours late yesterday coming home.

It seems that there were storms again in Houston Friday night, and the incoming IAH to CCS flight was two hours late. One of the flight attendants told me that the FAA rules state that a pilot has to wait twice as long as the flight time before he can get behind the yoke again. So our 9:10 AM flight turned into a 1:17 PM

The good thing was that I knew it before I got down to the airport. I still got there on time, got a good seat, and struggled through the interminable Venezuelan airport bureaucracy. It took about an hour from when I got my ticket to when I got to the gate area.

Once, when I was living in Caracas, I was on an early morning (7:00 AM, if I recall correctly) American Airlines flight. Many, many people did not get through immigration before the flight left. I asked the flight crew (with my obsessive fear of missing a flight, I was one of the folks on the plane) about the 50% of the passengers who were not there. I was told that American does not have an immigration hold policy. I don’t know what happened to those poor jokers who missed the flight.

But I am home again. It was a good trip.