Plane Conversations

Okay, so here’s a something I never thought I’d hear, “I’ve got a plane load of Turkish policeman who were supposed to be in Tuscaloosa.  They don’t speak English, but they speak German.  Come help me!”  An agent with another carrier yelled these desperate sentences through the  locked American Eagle office door at the Columbus, MS, airport.  Of course, this happened late at night and, of course, I was on-shift that night.  Now, here’s the thing – I speak French, not German; so, I’m not sure why my assistance was sought.  Nevertheless, my coworker, Cecelia, and I poked our heads out of the office in a train-wreck-rubber-necker kind of way.

Sure enough, the hub city for another carrier had boarded some 13 Turkish policemen on the wrong aircraft.  The men were en route to the K-9 training facility at Tuscaloosa and had been traveling for nearly 24 hours when they landed in Columbus.  They were exhausted and more than a little confused.  Thankfully, my sister speaks German; so, I was able to call her, tell her what we were doing to help them and have her speak to them.  The translation was slow and it wasn’t an ideal situation, but, at least we were able to clue them in better than we had been able to with hand gestures.  You see, contrary to an assertion made by Major Frank Burns on an episode of M*A*S*H, not everyone can speak English if you just speak it to them slowly and loudly enough.

I’ve been through commuter terminals at Atlanta, Cincinnati, Nashville, JFK, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.  While the airports are vastly different, the commuter areas are strikingly similar in that they are all really easy to get turned around in.  Several flights may be boarding through the same gate at the same time, just onto different buses.  Although the gate agent gives the destination city name at the gate and on the bus and the pilot gives the destination city name over the aircraft PA system, it’s still pretty easy to understand how someone might end up on the wrong plane – especially if they are exhausted and don’t speak the language.  That explains the Turkish policemen, no doubt, but not so much the Chattanooga-bound neurosurgeon who, upon deplaning, was most unhappy to see it announced in three-foot, brushed metal letters that he was at Lexington’s Bluegrass International Airport.  I’m still wondering about that one.

That night in Columbus, as I was brewing pots of coffee and fielding apparent marriage proposals (seems they didn’t have many redheads in Turkey), it never occurred to me that there was another option – that someone other than a rock star or a Rockerfeller could charter an aircraft.  Even today, many people believe that all we do in the charter world is take rock stars to resorts, when, in fact, we take regular people to business meetings, to family and squadron reunions, to football games, to car races and we take transplant teams to retrieve life-saving organs.   There’s a lot more to us than glitz and glamour.

Sure, we fly some rock stars, some wealthy business people and some politicians, but, mostly, it’s just regular people – like you, like me and like the occasional Turkish policemen.

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