So, after getting to Nashville BNA Airport, walking from the airport Hilton at 4 AM, I managed to get on the flight to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport with plenty of time to spare. The BNA->DFW flight was uneventful, I got to DFW on time and got to the gate for the flight to Japan, and that’s when it all went FUBAR.
The plane scheduled to fly us to Narita Airport in Japan was sitting being “maintenanced”, for an unspecified problem (at least they wouldn’t tell us). To top it off, the flight was overbooked, and they kept asking for volunteers who had “flexible flight plans” to get re-booked on a later flight. Who in their right mind is that “flexible” about flying to Japan?
At any rate, they had no ETR for the repair work, and kept posting new estimated departure times, 30 minutes at a time. Once maintenance was finished, they had to hustle us onto the plane so the flight crew could take off without running out of their allotted flying time, we were settled in, the captain announced they had paperwork to complete, but about 10 minutes later announced we had to “deplane”, since they ran out of time.
Once we were back in the terminal, they announced that a new crew was being sought, and that they would fly that plane to Japan, just later than planned. It was supposed to leave DFW at 12:05 PM, but it was almost 5 when they made us play “plane-deplane”. Once they had a crew scheduled they had to get them to the airport, so they scheduled the new departur at 7:45 PM, almost 8 hours later. This meant we’d arrive in Japan at 11:20 PM on Sunday evening.
At the appointed time, we boarded again (with some trepidation) but we ended up staying on the plane, until it took off sometime after 8 PM Saturday night. The flight itself was uneventful, and we landed at the scheduled time. It took only a few minutes to get through Immigration and Customs, I had to show the paperwork for my 2 month supply of prescription meds, and then I managed to catch the last train from the airport, headed into Narita town and my hotel.
If it works, this video I shot in the hotel room, just after midnight, just before I crashed. I recovered and went into Tokyo later Monday morning and picked up the key to my apartment, but that’s for a later post.