On the Road
Best Choices to Be Stranded: Syracuse, Albany, Pepperoni
By JOE SHARKEY
Published: August 28, 2007
IT’S been an awful year for air travel, with delays and cancellations at record levels, with passengers stuck for hours on packed planes waiting to take off.
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Chris Gash
Against this backdrop, sending out for pizza is an act of customer service genius.
But that happened three times recently that I am aware of. Passengers on three flights on Aug. 17 were astonished to see that someone had thought enough to have pizza and sodas sent their way.
One of those passengers was Robynne Reiber, a frequent business traveler who lives in New York and said that every flier she knows has been complaining about “the hassles of air travel and the lack of respect given passengers by airlines.”
That’s why the pizza at the airport in Syracuse was such a shock. “I was astounded,” she told me.
“I couldn’t believe how well I was being treated,” she said.
She was on Delta Flight 424 from Phoenix to Kennedy International Airport. About 90 minutes after takeoff, the pilot made one of those dreaded announcements that typically begin with the words, “Well, folks, ...”
It was a Friday afternoon, and half the flights over the continent seemed to be heading for the East Coast, where thunderstorms were turning most of them away. The Delta flight had been instructed to circle over Colorado.
With Kennedy closed, the flight was ultimately diverted to Syracuse.
There, according to Ms. Reiber, the pilot said: “I’m not going to keep you on the plane. I’m going to pull up to a gate where you can get off, as long as you wait there in case we have to leave. I know you’ve only had cheese and crackers. So I called the Sbarro in the terminal and asked them to keep sending pizzas out until the whole plane gets fed.”
At the gate, tables were set up. “The pilot said it might take a while to get everybody fed because this is probably more pizzas than they’re used to turning out at a time, so please be patient,” Ms. Reiber said.
Flight attendants helped serve while the pilot made regular announcements from the departure desk about the prospects for getting en route again.
“Finally, he said, ‘All right, everybody back on the plane, we have a slot,’ ” Ms. Reiber said.
“On the plane, the flight attendants kept saying, ‘If anybody needs anything, just ask and we’ll do the best we can. We’re all in this together.’ ”
The two pilots on Flight 424 were Gary Hale and Ty Rhame. The flight attendants were David Evans, Nancy Grimshaw and Melisa Walker.
Lynn Casey, a Delta customer service agent, paid for the pizza at the Syracuse airport — and did the same thing for another flight from the West Coast that had been diverted there the same afternoon, a Delta spokeswoman said.
The pizza connection appears to have been a trend on Aug. 17, at least in upstate New York. The same day, a Continental Express flight bound for Newark sat for an hour and a half at Albany International Airport waiting for the weather to break. An account of the Albany pizza delivery first appeared in The Albany Times-Union.
Doug Myers, the airport’s public affairs director, said he was in his office half listening to radio chatter from the tower when, he said, “The Continental Express pilot came on and said, ‘I’ve been out here for 90 minutes. Anybody know if a window is going to open up?’ ”
Mr. Myers and his boss, John O’Donnell, the airport’s chief executive, already had a plan in place after being stranded on a parked plane for five hours not long ago in Philadelphia.
The plan was to send out food for long-delayed flights and to keep airport food vendors open late if it looked as if delays were building in the region. The pizzas were on their way to the plane when the pilot had to return to the gate for refueling.
“We’d already heard all the talk” about stranded passengers on crowded planes for 3, 6 and even 10 hours, often without food or water, Mr. Myers said, adding,
“We decided we can’t let this kind of thing happen in Albany.”
E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com.
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