Phil sat by the gate waiting for boarding to begin. An extreme winter storm had brought temperatures in Denver to -20 F. Weather-associated delays swept across the Denver International Airport. Impatient travelers berated powerless airline employees. It’s a curious thing how people who are frustrated primarily by a lack of control over a situation gain relief from pretending that others have control and are somehow sabotaging things.
Phil felt lucky. His plane was one of the few in the airport that had not been significantly delayed. It was late in the evening and he felt fortunate to be nearly home. They went through the rigamarole of the tiered boarding process and, soon enough, everyone was finally on the plane.
After some period of inactivity, the pilot came over the PA and broke the news that they had to refuel before takeoff, but the fuelers were behind schedule. He also wanted everyone to keep their seatbelts on.
The passengers groaned but waited. 15 minutes passed. The airline’s automated alerts texted everyone on the plane to share that they had been delayed 15 minutes. These delays continued every 15 minutes. At the 45 minute mark, the frustration in the plane was palpable. The pilot graciously turned the fasten seatbelt sign off.
Some stood up to stretch, some switched from endlessly scrolling Instagram to endlessly scrolling Twitter, some gave monologues about how frustrated they were. To each his own. Phil started to watch a movie through the in-flight entertainment system.
At the 75 minute mark, most had made at least one exclamation about their frustration. The pilot, as powerless as any of the passengers but somehow the leader of the plane, apologized for the inconvenience. One woman demanded to be let off the plane. The airline accommodated her and she went back home. A man in first class got up and made a phone call. He had a connection with a man who was involved in the airport’s operations, and plead with him to resolve the situation.
“Look, this is ridiculous. I have [mundane thing to do]. I can’t fly out tomorow morning. I need you to figure this out. I don’t care what it takes.”
At the 2 hour mark, even Phil had lost faith in the plane taking off. It had been such a relief to get on the plane, but now the passengers envied those still waiting in the terminal. The pilot apologized for the third time.
The reason for the delay, quite obvious in retrospect, had eluded the imaginations of anyone on the plane, probably because they were a comfortable temperature. They looked outside and saw a clear runway; it seemed criminal that the only thing keeping them from their destination was fuel. People grumbled away about the airport operations. Some blamed the laziness of the individual employees, some blamed management, some blamed the airline, each pointed finger revealing someone’s station in life.
After another 30 minutes, the fuel truck arrived but stopped 25 yards from the plane. The passengers anxiously watched their saviors but there was no movement. 10 minutes passed but still the fuel truck remained stationary. An airline employee airline, annoyed by the inexplicable delay, walked down the jet bridge stairs and approached the fuel truck. When she got to the truck, she screamed and ran back to the jet bridge. 5 minutes later, sirens preceded an ambulance that raced to the fuel truck. They removed two bodies from the fuel truck on a stretcher and sped off.
After a few more minutes of the delay, the pilot announced over the PA system that the flight was cancelled. He apologized for a fifth time that night. In a shaky voice, he shared that the two fuelers had sustained cold-weather injuries.
Phil spent the night in the airport and caught the first flight the next morning. As the plane was taxiing, he read an online article about the frozen fuelers. The fuelers were on a 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off rotation because of the combination of extreme cold and lack of heat in their vehicles. Complaints about delays from passengers had spurred the airport management to cancel their recovery, and now two formely-cold minimum-wage employees were at room temperature as they lay lifeless in a morgue.