Stuck

Wow.  I don’t think I’ve ever had a stuck like that in Japan before.  After landing at CTS last night, the plane stopped on a taxiway to wait, as the gate we were supposed to come in at still had the previous flight at the jetway.  There was a lingering thunderstorm over the airport, so the tower wasn’t letting anyone take off, even though our flight and several after it had landed without incident.  After nearly half-an-hour, and with other planes stacking up behind us (that’s a guess, since I really couldn’t see what was going on, other than what I could see out the left side windows), they had us taxi over to the ramp for us to wait for a gate to clear around the same time the rain subsided.  The pilot shut down the main engines so we wouldn’t suck in anything.  Another half-hour passed, then without warning, the tractor that had ninja-ed in and attached itself to the nosegear towed us into our newly assigned gate.  Of course all this happened without me seeing any planes backing out of their gates or moving away from the terminal.  We had actually landed early, but deplaned over an hour late.

Listening to the pilot on the intercom explaining the situation was funny, since the Japanese version went into detail about the thunderstorm and safety and us not having a gate with multiple apologies, but the English was something like, “we apologize for the delay, but our arrival gate still has another flight, so we have to wait.  Thank you your attention.”  The guy stinky guy sitting next to me was getting all fidgety and sigh-y, and a little girl in the center section had a breakdown after wetting herself and becoming understandably uncomfortable.  I couldn’t tell if stinky guy was BO stinky, or if he had just eaten at a restaurant that cooked food that smells like homeless funk.  I was embarrassed that my Japanese speaking skills were lower than a child who was able to articulate to her mother that she needed a diaper change, and she needed it NOW.

I’ve had take-off stucks at NRT before they opened the new runway where the departing planes would stack up, but it was never like a similar LAX stuck.  I’ve even had NRT stucks at the bottleneck to the terminal from the new runway after it opened, but none of these stretched into an hour.  Luckily in this case, it was still late afternoon/early evening, so I didn’t run into the trains shutting down.