Travel, Airports and Flights

Story · all 20 words

Fifty Minutes in Istanbul

The worst-organised journey of my life was also, in the end, the one that worked, and I have never entirely recovered from what that taught me.

I was flying to Manchester with a connection in Istanbul, and I had booked it myself because it was ninety dinars cheaper. The gap between the two flights was fifty minutes. Everybody who heard this number made the same face.

It started badly. I tried to check in online the night before and the app refused, twice, for no stated reason. So I arrived at the airport three hours early, joined a queue of about two hundred passengers, and reached a desk where a very tired man told me my hand luggage was two centimetres too big. I removed four items, wore two of them, and it passed.

Security took fifty minutes. A woman in front of me had forgotten she was carrying a full bottle of olive oil, which she then refused to abandon on principle, and I have thought about her with admiration ever since.

The departure board said the flight was on time. It was not. There was a ninety-minute delay that appeared in stages, twenty minutes at a time, which is by far the cruellest way to receive that information. They also changed the gate twice, the second time to one at the very far end of the building, while the arrival time printed on my ticket slid quietly backwards.

By the time they finally let us take off I had accepted that my connection was gone. I had an aisle seat, which I always ask for, and next to me a boy of about seven had the window seat and did not look away from it once in four hours.

We landed in Istanbul thirty-five minutes before my second plane was due to leave. What happened next I still do not fully understand. A member of the crew came down the plane before we stopped, said three names including mine, and told us to come to the front. Somebody met us on the bridge with a printed boarding pass already in her hand. We half walked and half ran for about six minutes, past everybody, and I sat down on the second plane with my heart going like a machine while they were closing the doors.

I fastened my seat belt and laughed out loud, alone, which worried the man beside me.

My suitcase, of course, did not make it. It arrived two days later, and I collected it from an office near customs from a man who was extremely kind about the whole thing. I had my visa, my documents and nothing else, and it turned out that this was completely fine.

The jet lag lasted four days and the story has lasted nine years. And I still book the fifty-minute connection, every time, because ninety dinars is ninety dinars, and because now I know what the crew can do when they decide to.