CathayJumbo_picI’ve been flying around the world for thirty seven years now but my most recent flight from Las Vegas to Phuket Thailand after attending the [tag]Authority Site[/tag] Summit has been the worst ever.

Arriving at [tag-tec]Las Vegas[/tag-tec] airport it appeared that the flight we were booked on, my wife was with me, didn’t exist or the wrong details had been printed on our ‘eticket’.

However we were given boarding passes for a flight leaving thirty minutes later but stamped on the boarding passes was SSS. This turned out to mean ‘special selective screening’ and we had to go down a special channel where we passed through a ‘sniffer’ scanner for lack of a better word and our hand luggage was meticulously searched. Well we survived that and eventually boarded the plane where we were seated right at the back with an engine outside the window and no view.

We arrived in Los Angeles and boarded the next flight after normal security screening. While we waiting to depart a truck with the baggage handling conveyor belt on managed to run into one of the planes engines and caused damage that after almost two hours of inspections from officials, engineers and police resulted in the flight being cancelled and unembarkation to the terminal. Luckily Cathay Pacific had a spare plane at the airport and after standing around for a couple of hours, not enough seats, we boarded the plane and left five hours late.

Because of the delay we arrived in Hong Kong too late for our next flight and had to spend the night at a local hotel. Ground support was a bit lacking and it took some time to get this sorted out. However we were up early to catch the first flight to [tag]Bangkok[/tag].

We arrived in Bangkok late morning and still had time to catch our booked flight. I had chosen this flight so that we could sleep off our jetlag at a Bangkok hotel if we had been on schedule. However events took a terrible turn as we were waiting to board our plane to Phuket. A plane that tok off earlier had just crashed at [tag]Phuket[/tag] with a large loss of life. This was not known at the time, only that there had been an incident and our flight would be delayed. As information came in we were booked onto the first flight for the next morning so we left the airport to look for a hotel.

Arriving back at the airport at 0630 our plane had already been delayed two hours due to the situation in Phuket. It was soon apparent that Phuket airport might remain closed all day so we managed to change our flight to Krabi, about 100 miles from our home. We arrived there and travelled to our home in a two and a half hour taxi ride. A total journey of seventy hours since checking out of the hotel in Las Vegas but at least we made it.

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