Beijing Airport daily serves thousands of passengers. My time between connecting flights from Bangkok to JFK was six hours. I sat in the Chairman Mao Lounge and drank tea. Travelers came and went without real numbers. The vastness of the terminal swallowed humanity like a whale inhaled plankton. My economy class ticket granted none of the comfort of the international business lounges, but I discovered a group of lounge chairs facing the sun at the end of the terminal wing near my departing gate. I was happy.
Flight CA 981 was the antithesis of this bliss. An old 747. Small seats. Completely filled with first-time visitors to the USA. It's one step above the Triad's snake-head human-trafficking journey to the Golden Mountain. My window seat was 60A in the very back. Usually 60B was empty.
Not this flight.
The occupancy was 100%.
At times it seemed like passengers were sharing seats. The food was awful and my seat hard as a prison bench. I looked around for CIA handlers, as if I had been kidnapped for national security. This was only hard travel in the 21st Century.
The agony ended 14 hours later and I was glad to hit the ground at JFK, unlike a hooded, bound detainee in the back of a G4 flying to a secret prison. They want to the flight to last forever.
Do you really believe the CIA stopped all that stuff?
Abu Ghabi was not an aberration.
No comments:
Post a Comment