February 26, 2007

A few days ago, we received an email from one of our readers, copying us on a letter to Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines.

Dear Richard Branson,

I would like to tell you about the worst travel experience in my life.

Thursday, February 15, 2007, I had a premium economy ticket on Flight 18 from Newark to London Heathrow, scheduled to leave at 8:20 a.m. While sitting on board, we were delayed taking off by two hours. One of the two navigations systems was broken and finally it was determined that it could not be fixed. The pilot informed us that we could indeed take off, but would have to take the northerly route over the Arctic, a path that only requires one working navigation system. We took off at about 10:30 a.m. Now begins the debacle-laden journey full of ill-fated equipment and horrid Virgin Employees.

DEBACLE #1 - I was sitting near the left engine, and as we were taking off, I felt that I was in a 1970s Volkswagen bug. I could feel the surge of fuel being pumped in short bursts to the left jet engine, but it just would not “kick” in. We continued to fly very close to the ground as we turned north, and we could tell that something was terribly wrong. About 45 minutes after take off, we were told that there was smoke in the cabin, and that we would have to turn around and land at JFK. First, we would have to dump all of our fuel over the Atlantic Ocean, and then we could land. We were told we had to dump the fuel as we were too heavy to land, but that is most likely a white lie to keep the passengers from fearing that we could blow up upon landing. When we landed there were lots of fire trucks on hand. Fire marshals and the engineers came on board and about 30 minutes later we were told that we would not be flying in that aircraft. Quite scary.