It is almost too absurd to be real. Return flight from Vegas, second leg, Detroit to New York. We arrive at 3:20 for a 4:00 departure. As we are boarding, the gate agent mumbles something about there being a "weather issue" and that he was waiting for clearance. They board the plane anyway. We pull away from the gate, sit on the tarmac for about fifteen minutes and are told that we must RETURN to the gate because of weather related issues! By this time, it is about 4:45pm.

Why, you are correctly asking, would they knowingly board the plane then?

We taxi back to the gate and are told we won't leave for ONE HOUR. They (mistakenly, it turns out) allow us to get off the plane, but tell us we have to return by 5:15 OR WE WON"T BE ALLOWED BACK ON THE PLANE. Skip ahead to 5:30pm: we are now told that they are still waiting for confirmation to fly out and that we won't leave until 6:40 pm!!! We are, again, allowed to leave the plane (wrong, wrong) and must return by 6:15pm. At this point, we truly feel like human cattle, completely powerless and cursing the fact that we know nothing or no one in Detroit.

At 6:15 we re-board, optimistic that we will finally, nearly three hours later, leave. Oh no--apparently, at the 6:15pm cut off time, a family of five arrived back at the gate five minutes late. No agent was standing at the departure gate because he was stupidly talking to the captain (about what, we don't know) and LEFT THE GATE OPEN AND UNMANNED. The family somehow got back on the plane after the fact. They determined that this was a security breach, which required that EVERYONE get OFF THE PLANE and get RE-SCREENED THROUGH SECURITY!! To make matters worse, once we were herded off the plane, the gate agent actually had the balls to POINT OUT to the gathering crowd the people AT FAULT, so we could blame someone for what we were going through!! When it was really HIS fault!

There were about seven Homeland Security officers, airport security, Detroit Metro Police and assorted others interviewing the offending family and the gate agent. It was discovered that the agent was at fault, and the family was allowed back on the plane, but I'm sure that guy won't lose his job because Spirit is such a bootleg airline.

At that moment I totally understood how the last few terrorists were allowed to get away with bringing shit on a plane. An unmanned, open departure gate!!

In short, we actually got in the air at 9:00pm, five hours after we were supposed to depart. They also had the fucking gall to charge us for drinks! No free rounds for anyone after what they put us through! Just some pathetic apologies and bullshit tiny pretzel packets. My husband now calls them "Dispirited Airlines" and we are pretty much certain that we are never flying again. Ever. This country's infrastructure is so ridiculously broken, the airlines are a racket and human beings are treated like circus cattle. That's the story. Know anyone who writes about this kind of thing for the newspapers? I'd love to put Spirit Airlines out of business.

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