A sea of people swarmed the smashed Spirit gates at LAX.
Photo by: Harrison Shiels
Approximately 2.9-million travelers – a record for U.S. airports – flew on Friday, May 24, 2024. I was one of them.
My son Harrison and I were set to soar to the Motor City to cover the world-famous “Movement” – the annual electronic techno music and cultural festival produced by Paxahau at Hart Plaza in Detroit – the birthplace of techno music. Before parking our car, we each polished off a “three-by-three” cheeseburger (with spread only) and fries on the patio of the In-N-Out restaurant outside the runway fence at LAX, where we watched airplanes land right over our heads. “A big British Airways 747 from London is coming next,” said Harrison, monitoring a flight radar app on his phone.
His smart phone then made Harrison aware our Spirit Airlines flight to Detroit, scheduled for wheels-up at 9:15 pm, had been delayed to nearly midnight.
“We have time now before sunset to hit the beach at Playa Del Rey,” Harrison suggested. Ten-minutes later, we watched planes over the Pacific as Harrison tossed me a frisbee next to the beach chairs he tugged out of the trunk of his Jeep Cherokee. We parked free on the street between the dunes and a grassy park with a pond, swings, a baseball diamond and a basketball court. Harrison suggested we have a beer when he spotted a bar called Dockside/King Beach Café & Grain Whiskey Bar (which was a hidden speakeasy in the back.)
“Pretty good use of a flight delay?” Harrison asked, sipping an IPA in deck chair beside a fire on the veranda. I agreed: the surprise outing in the California twilight was golden.
It was dark by the time the Joe’s Parking shuttle dropped us at the LAX terminal, but we still arrived at the gate 90-minutes before liftoff, even though a Spirit snafu forced me through the non-TSA pre-check security line. When I finally emerged from the screening, tying up my shoes and re-threading my belt, Harrison, who breezed through the pre-check line, was waiting for me with an Estrella Jalisco draught beer. “I thought this might ease your pain,” offered the blonde boy, who had chosen a more potent craft potion for himself.
Spirit Airlines cut me off twice when, while walking through the terminal, I phoned and waited on hold to add my pre-check trusted traveler number to my reservation. I gave up, figuring I just would settle it in-person with the gate agent, but he essentially cut me off, too. He was unable to even find my return reservation, despite the fact I presented the confirmation number.
But that was not the real story of the gate.
Harrison and I stood amidst a biblical-style sea of people – a wall of humanity – waiting for flights to Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland and Atlanta smashed into adjacent boarding gates. I am guessing there was an imbalance of one chair for every seven people, so when I saw two open-up, I suggested we sit. Because the chaotic noise was so loud, if boarding announcements were made, we could not hear them, so Harrison, never sitting, shuffled back and forth, wading through the mosh pit of people to check our flight status. He also monitored his flight radar app and the digital board at the gate, which was never updated and still read “9:15.”
Just as my chin was hitting my chest, my droopy eyes went wide open when Harrison showed me the map on his app and exclaimed, “Our flight left! It’s on the runway now!”
After decades of catching planes all over the world, I have never experienced anything like this. That same overwhelmed Spirit gate agent we talked to at check-in merely shrugged. After Harrison and I protested and worked him over with a “good cop-bad cop” routine, still offered us only “free re-booking” on the 7:30 am flight.
We would have spent $200 to sleep in an airport hotel or for each of us to taxi back and forth to home, and since it was midnight, it would not be enough time to sleep much anyway before awakening and turning back around. Therefore, Harrison and I settled in for the night on the floor next to a power outlet hidden between a boarding gate wall and a window. “Remember that time, when you were little, we ‘camped’ in my Buick at Niagara Falls?” I asked Harrison.
“Yeah, but we had smores that time,” he recalled. The airport amenities, by then, had been closed for two hours. “Maybe in six-hours the restaurants will open and we can get a breakfast sandwich because we will have a four-hour flight on Spirit with no food. And keep your phone charged all night because there is no in-flight entertainment.”
An airport, in the middle of the night, is colder and louder than you might expect. A woman awakened us at 2 am to clean windows while the vacuums and floor-polishing machines cranked.
I advised Spirit of the situation, after navigating their army of automated artificial intelligence chatbots on the app, and received, in response, as a courtesy, an email offering a $50-dollar discount on a future flight – which can be applied the fare only – not Spirit’s $58 baggage fee. When I tried to redeem the emailed voucher one week later, with all my professional travel savvy, I found it virtually impossible to access and use. It cannot be used through the app – only the website, which was complicated and confusing. (When I called the phone number provided, I was told I would be charged a $25 fee for using the phone system, which would have halved the voucher’s value. Then I was given another phone number to call – 801-401-2222 – which rang five times and then disconnected – twice. All told, I wasted two hours trying to use the Spirit voucher.)
When we did land in Detroit at midday, the indefatigable Harrison rallied to rock.
“The adventure continues,” he said as he jumped in an Uber from Detroit Metro Airport’s Evans Terminal at 3 pm to head straight downtown to party all night at Movement!
Contact Michael Patrick Shiels at MShiels@aol.com His new book: Travel Tattler – Not So Torrid Tales, may be purchased via Amazon.com
