Never Fly in a Blizzard

It was December vacation, 2014. I had plans to fly down to Florida with my sister and cousin to visit our grandparents for the week. For months I had been looking forward to spending quality time with my extended family, and escaping the snow and cold water. I woke up that morning at around 10am. My flight was scheduled to take off at around 7pm. Or so I thought.

I woke up to my mom in a complete panic. She was on the phone with my grandfather and researching other flights to Florida. The news was blaring throughout the house. New England was expecting to get a huge snow storm.

My flight had not yet been cancelled, so we drove to the airport. My parents kept telling my sister, cousin and I to not get our hopes up about going to Florida, because chances were our vacation to Florida would be cancelled. The airport was extremely chaotic. Flights were being cancelled by the minute. Travelers were in a frenzy. It was a disaster.

After we checked in, said goodbye to our parents, went through security, and walked to the gate, we saw that our plane was on time. It was planned to take off in about 30 minutes. Suddenly the words “on time” on the TV screen at the gate were replaced by the word “delayed”. One of the gate attendees announced that something had to be fixed on the airplane, so we would have to wait an extra 40 minutes to board. Finally, we were able to begin the boarding process and get onto the airplane. At this point, our flight was the last flight to take off for the night due to the dangerous flying conditions.

We were sitting on the plane for about 30 minutes before the pilot made an announcement that the airplane had to be “de-iced”, because there was too much ice on the plane and it was not safe to fly. This took about 30 minutes. I, along with every other passenger on the plane began to get very frustrated and anxious. I just wanted to be in the air, on my way to Florida. The snow was coming down very hard and accumulating very quickly. After the plane was “de-iced”, the pilot made another announcement that we had to wait for the runways to be plowed. Another 40 minutes go by, and I thought that we could finally take off and in just a few hours I would be in the warm Florida weather. But, I was wrong. The plane had to be “de-iced” once more.

Finally, after waiting for about four hours we were ready to take off. I have been on an airplane many times throughout my life but, none of the flights that I have been on were as scary as the flight that night. The combination of the wind and snow made for a very bumpy and terrifying flight. I thought the plane was going to crash. Realistically, the flight should have been canceled, but I was very happy and relieved to finally be in Florida.