Decontrolled
I was supposed to be in Cork over the weekend.
Not only was it high time I paid my mother a visit, but the Cork Folk Festival was happening too. So I booked some relatively cheap plane tickets for myself and Jessica back in August and noted down the days in my calendar.
We didn’t end up getting our flight. This time it wasn’t because I messed up the flight times. We made it to Gatwick airport in plenty of time. That’s when we saw that our flight was delayed.
See, Storm Amy was moving in. We were hoping to get into Cork before the storm hit, but now with the flight delayed, that wasn’t likely. In fact, it was more likely that the flight would just get more and more delayed and possibly even get diverted.
To start with, we settled in at the airport, prepared to spend an hour or two more than we had planned. But, sure enough, the delays kept piling up. It was time to make decision; wait it out in the hopes that we’d eventually make a very bumpy landing in Cork, or cut our losses and run.
I quickly looked up flights for the next couple of weekends and spotted some cheap ones a fortnight away. I booked them and then called my mother to tell her we wouldn’t be showing up that night, but we’d see her in a couple of weeks.
Alright then, time to go home.
Wait a minute …how exactly are we supposed to leave the airport other than on an airplane?
It turns out there’s a process called “decontrolling”. You need to find someone from the airline (or in our case, a third-party contractor operating on the airline’s behalf) who has the security privileges to walk you back out. But you still need to go through passport control …even though you never left the building.
Luckily we didn’t have any checked luggage or it would’ve gotten complicated. As it was, it was just weird. It was all very City And The City.
That flight we abandoned did finally take off …six hours late. By that time we were back home on the sofa eating pizza and listening to the wind gusting outside. I think we made the right choice.