After the ferry docked at Fethiye I hopped into an arranged car and headed straight for Dalaman airport to catch a 10 pm plane back to Istanbul. It’s about an hour's drive from a-b, just enough time to shed a couple of tears for the part of the journey that was over.
Upon arriving at the airport I received a text from Turkish Airlines stating that my flight had been delayed for 180 minutes. There’s not a lot of optimism in a 180-minute delay. Does 180-minutes sting less than saying it’s a 3-hour delay? I suppose it’s just easier to add on minutes if that’s what we’re already going by.
And minutes were added.
It was around 2 am that we started to board, we thought all was well.
Once we were all boarded and buckled up, the captain announced that we were having trouble with our AC and struggling to turn the engine on or something small like that.
So we were on a hot plane with a funky engine with already exhausted and late passengers. I had the window seat and managed to keep my cool by focusing inward on the space that I had and how little control over the situation I had. That seemed to help me a quite deal. A lot of the other passengers did not fare so well, especially the ones with kids. These babies were hot, we were all hot, and tired too.
At one point a few of the flight attendants got yelled at and vented at (with complimentary crowd shouting) but I don’t speak enough Turkish to know exactly what was being said. That’s the beauty of body language, we all definitely heard and felt the message of these distraught passengers regardless of any language barriers.
After about 2 hours of this, some people decided to just leave the plane. I’m guessing it was about 30 or so people that had abandoned ship.
I was sitting there thinking, “is this one of those final destination things and I’m supposed to get off this plane now because this plane might blow up mid-flight and all the people who abandoned will be the survivors because of their intuitions?!” It might seem like a little much but I hadn’t slept and the energy of the plane was definitely getting weird.
I decided to stay and take my chances. I had to get back to Istanbul, I was already committed to this flight.
Around 4ish am the pilot announced that they got everything to work, the AC cranked on, and that we could leave in a bit but now we had to wait for another reason. The passengers that decided to flee either had to make a decision to come back on or we had to go through all the luggage and get theirs off for them.
We waited a bit longer.
Around 5am, we finally departed Dalaman. All that for a 1 hr flight. It was entertaining and a good test on my chill (I think I passed). A blessing- the people in front of me all left so I took their whole row and lounged across the seats for a very precious 1 hr flight.
I passed out and woke up as the sun was rising and we were getting close to Istanbul.
Me documenting my sweaty chill.
A beautiful sunrise welcoming me back to Istanbul ♥️, I was just happy to land.