What Is Your Most Infuriating Flight Delay Horror Story?

Photo: Stefan Jeremiah (AP)

More than 9,000 flights have been canceled since Monday, ruining travel plans for thousands and thousands of people and leaving many stranded. In fact, Jalopnik’s own Andy Kalmowitz got stuck in Philadelphia while trying to get home from Colorado where he covered the 2023 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. If you want to read about that saga (and believe me, it was definitely a saga), you can check it out here.

Delta’s Luggage Only Flight

Andy’s certainly not the only Jalopnik staffer who’s found themselves stranded in an airport for an obnoxiously long time. Who can forget the time that Steve DaSilva got stuck in Amsterdam overnight and had to sleep on a small, hard loveseat because France’s air traffic controllers went on strike? Unfortunately, if you travel enough, it’s bound to happen eventually.

Which actually means I probably haven’t traveled enough because while I’ve dealt with my fair share of canceled flights on work trips, I have yet to deal with anything worse than an extra hour or two added to my layover or a few hours stuck on the tarmac. Perhaps because, unlike Andy, I usually fly Delta and not United. Delta certainly isn’t perfect, but it sure wasn’t Delta that dragged David Dao off the plane after he boarded back in 2017.

But surely some of you have some flight delay horror stories that make being rerouted to Philadelphia or spending the night in Amsterdam sound like a walk in the park in comparison. So please post them in the comments below so we can commiserate over how awful airlines have gotten. And also so we can fight over which airlines are worse than the others. Delta may have not screwed me over just yet, but I’m sure at least one of you hasn’t been so lucky.