This was my experience coming back from London to Los Angeles on Saturday:
My aunt was going to Jamaica on an earlier flight, so we got to the airport very early. I saw that the departure time of my flight had changed from 11:35 to noon. At around 9:00 I hugged her good-bye at her gate (miles away from the shopping/main terminal area), and that was it. Fast forward three hours. It's noon, and the marquee still says "please wait" next to my flight. No gate number. What is going on?? I found the Information area, and it was then that I heard the dreaded words "volcanic ash cloud". Whaaat? I stood in a long line for 45 minutes, only to find out that no one knew anything. I went back out to the terminal, and sat down. Luckily, a few minutes later my flight showed a gate number!!! We went through Passport Control and boarded the plane, and the captain explained that we'd have some more waiting time at the gate, because Air Traffic Control had to squeeze a lot of airplanes into a very small amount of air space. We finally took off at 4:45 p.m.
The pilot also said that because of the "on duty" limits for crew, we'd have to land in Chicago first. This part of the flight took over nine hours due to rerouting around the ash cloud. We took off and flew northeast almost to Sweden before turning left over the North Sea. We flew just north along Iceland, and then along Greenland.
When we got to Chicago, we had to take everything with us and go through Customs because it was an international flight. We also had to collect our checked bagged from the carousel, and then carry it down a long hallway, only to stack it up again to be rechecked. We also had to go through security again. Our flight reboarded at a different gate (L8 - which another passenger pointed out to me is "Late", right?
) at 10:15. We took off at 10:45 Chicago time (same airplane), and then it was another four hours to L.A.
We staggered off the airplane at LAX at almost 1:00 a.m. L.A. time; that would be 9:00 a.m. U.K. time! The fight was originally scheduled to land at 2:25 p.m., almost twelve hours earlier.
Now, don't get me wrong... I'm grateful that we were able to get out at all. A lot of flights were canceled outright that day. But if I had the choice of whether or not to book a trip to Europe right now with all of this going on? No, I wouldn't! There's too much of a chance of getting stuck.
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