This year, I looked for a January 1 Porter flight from Halifax to Toronto but found not flights. I love that little airline with the centrally located Toronto airport, free food, and cute mascot. But a couple of years ago, I had one bad winter hassle/ordeal that is a dark lining to their operation.
(This is about a Halifax-Toronto flight I took on January 2, 2009 and written around that time. It has been edited a little now for clarity.)
The good part: Getting a night-time aerial tour of downtown Toronto.
The bad part: Instead of our regularly-scheduled 2-hour flight*, it took FOUR HOURS for me to get from Halifax to Toronto and that is not including the 90-minute initial delay in departure.
After enduring seemingly neverending turbulence approaching Toronto, we passengers were informed that the Little Airport we were supposed to land in could not take us due to a snowstorm and delayed snow removal and we landed at the Big Airport (LBP). While at LBP, we refueled and waited in line to embark on the 10-minute flight to the Little Airport. All of us would have accepted deplaning at the Big Aiport except the airline did not operate at all out of it and couldn’t let us off. And we waited… first for snow ahead of us to be cleared… then for our turn to take off. We waited for our baggage to arrive on the conveyor in a start-and-stop consistency that made you think someone was hand-cranking the baggage carousel and getting tired to boot.
I don’t blame the sweet little commuter airline that I had chosen to fly with – Porter Airlines – but this massive delay did occur with them. Thankfully I was not in a big rush and I had pre-loaded my iPod (Touch) with e-books (started and finished Benjamin Button), webpages to read (saved with Instapaper), and MY inspired me not to give up on a little App Store game named Labyrinth. However, a little while longer and I was going to have to befriend that guy sitting behind me….
* Touted to be extra efficient for Porter Airlines has it own centrally-located airport and you need not arrive so early in advance.