I’m in New York today, hanging out at JFK until my flight to Kiev. My flight here was a “red eye” flight, and it certainly lived up to it’s name, at least in terms of my appearance. The clock on the wall may have said 6:30 am, but as I was/am still on Portland time, that’s actually the wee hours of the morning. Nevertheless, a day pass to “The Lounge” and a couple hours snoozing in a club chair has done wonders.

A couple interesting things about my flight. First, I thought it was interesting that I arrived at PDX just as last colors in the sky were fading, only to get off the plane in NYC just as the dawn colors were giving way to the brightness of day. Second, sleeping on a full plane is next to impossible; it’s even more impossible – assuming that’s possible – when you’re sitting on the aisle and getting brushed or bumped by people every 15 minutes.

The flight itself wasn’t boring, either. There were apparently two unusual incidents on the flight, necessitating that we be met by Port police upon arrival. The first event I don’t have a lot of information on — actually I don’t have a lot of information on either — but the end result was two groups of people switching seats before we landed, and one guy being escorted off the plane by police when we did. I’m guessing it wasn’t a “dangerous” thing, or else the plane would have been diverted or something. So I’m guessing it was something of a more “personal crime” type of thing.

The other incident was medical. It too wasn’t serious for a flight diversion, but it was sufficiently critical for the crew to make one of those “is there a doctor in the house?” announcements during the middle of the flight. When we landed, an older guy was helped off (though he was walking on his own).

Rather a bit of excitement, right? And this was just the first of my flights for this trip. I hope it wasn’t a preview of things to come…

(By the way, if I forget, remind me to do some searching when I get home to see if there were any news reports about these events. It would be interesting to get the fuller story.)