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| - While our whole family has been using Southwest for around 30 years, and have obviously been pleased, getting stuck here in Phoenix for 6 hours was certainly out of the norm... A friend and I were coming back from a convention in Los Angeles and hand carrying about 200 pounds of laptops, computers and audio and video recording equipment that we just didn't care to check (have handled with other luggage). I know we were pushing the limit of carry on weight and if we had had any idea what was going to happen we would not have even thought of carrying that much weight.
What ended up happening, we still don't quite know. We suspect there was something wrong with the plane that we were supposed to be getting on to get back to Texas. It either wasn't there, or they grounded it or something and we were told that our plane was coming from NEW YORK and it was going to take a "few hours". We were like, WTF!? WHY, would they send a plane from New York almost to California and Mexico to take us back home to Southeast Texas???
They were not joking. It took about 4.5 hours for our plane to arrive. It really did come from New York, empty, to take us home. Now to Southwests credit, they fed us. They ordered like 75-80 large pizzas from Domino's whom delivered them to us. So we got to eat and chit chat with people from all over the world, take some naps on the floor and basically live there in the terminal for a large slice of our day.
Here's my major gripe. After all of this, and having boarding group A, we were just ready to get on the damn plane and get home. My friend's wife was wondering what in the world was going on, we were both getting irritable and what happens? A group of 17 people (yes we counted them) obviously from another country where courtesy and honesty must not exist, all pre-boarded to accompany a SINGLE child that was like 6-7 years old! NO KIDDING! I mean, what kind of BS is that?
When we finally left out, it was well after the airport had closed and SW had to get special clearance from the FAA to leave at 2:30am since it was after noise regulation time. We got the clearance, pilot said he was going to push it, got up to 47,000 feet and hauled ass way above and across Texas and back to Houston. The pilot was able to cut 35 minutes off the normal flight time and we were going so fast that the nose of the plane was up higher than normal. I have read that a 737 is capable of breaking the sound barrier (768 mph) and while I am sure a commercial pilot would not do something like that, I actually asked the stewardess how fast we were going. She went and asked the pilot and she came back with the answer. "About 700 mph." That was the fastest I have ever gone in a 737 before.
This was a very unusual experience to have with Southwest, and aside from the 17 people boarding with one child, I like how they handled the situation. I'd still be interested to know what happened to the plane that was supposed to be there for us when we came from Los Angeles, but they didn't have much information other than the fact that it might have been a safety issue.... Stuff happens. I still like Southwest and use them all the time.
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