Stranded

Not since my school days in England have I had to sit on top of a heater to get warm.

No. That’s not true. I had to do so during the summer when I worked in an over air-conditioned terminal at JFK Airport.

Through the 30 years I worked in that building, they never managed to control the temperature. The place was a great concrete mausoleum. When we moved in, the summer of 1970, we commented that at least the roof wouldn’t leak.

So what was the first thing that happened?

Maybe not quite. The first thing that happened was that our cabin crew went on strike. Dealing with the chaos of such an eventuality is bad enough, but when you have just moved into an unfamiliar office and not yet fully unpacked, the term chaos develops new meaning.

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One of my first assignments, the day we moved, was to escort an ambulance that was delivering a stretcher patient to a departing aircraft, my problem being that no-one told me how to get air-side from the public roadway.

The ambulance arrived late and looked like delaying the flight, so no pressure! The driver picked up on the urgency and put his foot down as we made a circuit of the airport. It had begun to rain and the road was slick with the result that the vehicle skidded and almost tipped over, but we kept going. In desperation, I pointed to a roadway beside the TWA terminal which I knew had access to the airfield but I had no idea whether it would be open or what I would suggest if not.

Multiple hijackings over the previous months had led to the beginning of security checks but they were in their infancy, thus the ambulance made it onto the tarmac unchallenged and now the only problem was negotiating taxiways without crashing into any of the multitude of ramp vehicles that rush about, or encountering an actual aeroplane.

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Luckily, we arrived ship-side intact. Not a ship, of course. I believe it was a Boeing 707, destined for Montego Bay and Kingston, Jamaica. I remember that the ramp coordinator was having a bad day, just like the rest of us.

That period was a complete circus and there were so many incidents that I should have written down. Often we wanted to pull our hair out – tightly restrained and above the collar though it had to be in those days!

But equally, we laughed a great deal.

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When the strike took hold, just two or three days after the big move, all our flights were cancelled except the Bermuda shuttle which kept going back and forth with the same crew who were not bound by the strike until they returned to base in London.

The 747 had only recently begun to operate, so we had a large number of flights operated by narrow-bodied aircraft that were always fully booked. Staff passengers, therefore had difficulty getting seats at the best of times but once the strike was resolved, we had several days backlog, so we saw the same anxious faces at the counter night after night.

At check-in we worked in pairs. My colleague and I had one poor family trying desperately to get home to India. The father resorted to picking up his little children to show us: “See my little boy! See my little girl!” he said over and over, hoping I suppose that it would influence his chances, but we could not even find seats for full fare passengers.

In the end, we couldn’t take it anymore. The sight of the unfortunate man’s face made us giggle inappropriately, so when we saw him coming, we ducked behind the counter. I guess the family made it home eventually. I still remember the name and those children will be close to 60 now, but in my memory they will always be those two poor stranded kids.

I bet you thought I was going to write about being stranded by the snow!

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