It's not that I didn't believe the various reports in the press over the years, about the horrific delays at various airports, in various weather related conditions, and assorted labor issues. But Sunday evening, extending into Sunday morning, it happened to me. The airline involved has a "hub" at my local airport, and I have a frequent flyer account with them.

My experience was probably not as grim as the worst I've read about, but close enough. An earlier flight was overbooked, and quite a few passengers overflowed onto our flight, filling it to capacity. It seemed that the available seats to take the people bumped from the earlier flight were hit and miss, one seat here, another over there, and so on. The gate agents had made no attempt to keep family groups together, and one distressed father wandered up and down the aisle, from one cabin to the next, attempting to persuade others to swap with each other, with some of his family members, so that he could supervise all the young children. The flight attendants got more and more irritated with him for getting in the way, but never once that I observed, offered to help him resolve things. Whether he was content or not, I couldn't tell, but eventually he did sit down and buckle up.

For reasons never explained to us, we boarded about half an hour after the scheduled time, the plane taxied out for take off, and the pilot announced that we were some 15th or 16th in line for take off. Before we made it to the front of the line, I could tell the plane had moved out of the line, and listened to the pilot announce we had to wait until we could be rerouted around bad weather.

2 1/2 hours later, we took off. The entire time we waited, in our seats, in the plane, on the tarmac. Several passengers who were New York area residents and wanted to deplane, since their connections were obviously shot, were not allowed to do so, since "we would lose our position in the take off queue." Reportedly, all gates were occupied by incoming flights, so even a quick trip to unload was impossible, according to the various announcements we heard.

I had a seat in the first class cabin, courtesy of a frequent flyer upgrade. The flight attendants appeared to be missing quite a few basic items - drinks were served without ice; and at one point coach class passengers were instructed to keep their cups or do without a drink for the remainder of the flight. My seatmate requests for a snack were refused - with the explanation that they could not use ovens until airborne. However about three hours later when dinner did arrive, the vegetables were the consistency of baby food, so there was some oven in operation somewhere. I asked for a cup of coffee, and got it. It was never offered again, even at dinner.

One group seated near me seemed to have good friends in the flight crew, and the young boy in the group was given the cabin speaker microphone and parroted various canned announcements - he "welcomed" us on board quite a few times.

We finally took off, after a thunderstorm passed. The rest of the flight was OK, until we got close to our destination airport. The pilot thought it would be bumpy, so we received instructions to sit up straight, buckle our seatbelts, etc, etc. The passengers with friends in the flight crew were in the row directly in front of me, with seats fully reclined, all of them sleeping soundly. The flight attendants did nothing to waken them, or move their seats upright.

I have understood over the years that the instruction to keep seats upright during landing was for safety's sake, to make a potential evacuation as unobstructed as possible. God forbid I ever have to evacuate, but if I do, you bet your last dollar that I want it to be unobstructed!

Since the flight attendants disappeared after the pilot made his announcement, I responded to the airline's customer service department website yesterday morning. I received a rather convoluted reply, written by someone who clearly learned another language before taking on English. He/she assured me that the safety issue would be taken up with the flight crew. I hope that's right.

Quite a few of the customer service lapses were the fault of the airline, but it seems to me the situation could have been much better with some forethought on the part of the officiating agencies involved. Why make all westbound flights line up in the original order of departure? For that matter, why schedule 16 flights to leave in the same five minute time span? Why not, with bad weather heading in, instruct flights headed in other directions to remain at the gate, allow passengers to wait in the terminal, and load up the westbound bunch and send them on their way?

To top everything off, when I called for a pickup to the lot where I parked my car, the driver made an extra circuit around the terminal building - about a 20 minute trip "to make sure no one else is waiting" This was at midnight. When he dropped me off, I didn't tip him. Just as guilt pangs were settling in on THAT score, the cashier refused to take a cash payment, insisting on a credit card, "since were changing shifts" No guilt pangs, anymore - not at all!