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Missing Screw Follies  The Air France version of the Airbus 340, grounded in Boston for lack of a few foreign screws. |
A surprise overnight in a
pock-marked Boston burb
of TheColumnists.com
I never expected to spend the night in a cheap hotel in Chelsea, a down-at-the-heel Boston suburb pock-marked with vacant lots and abandoned factories and what looked like bullet holes here and there.
It was a $28 cab ride from Boston’s Logan Airport–at least by the time our Ethiopian driver finished his grand tour. In the bargain, I got a long monologue about the wonders of Eritrea, Addis Ababa and neighboring Somalia. Why he preferred Boston to such marvels he never explained.
As the ride dragged on, I wondered if he was heading for a container where my wife, my daughter and I would be bound, gagged and held hostage for a few million euros, then shot in the eye. It was a relief to finally arrive at the dump that Air France had assigned us and get safely settled behind locked doors.
The occasion was the cancellation of our Boston-Paris flight on Nov. 15, due to a screw that the pilot needed to get before taking off. That was the explanation we were given at the gate. We avoided making the obvious jokes because getting cancelled was not funny, urgent screw or not. We had been waiting two hours in the so-called lounge beyond official boarding time (“For security reasons, be sure to arrive three hours early,” they always warn you) when they finally cancelled the flight.
This was the beginning of a saga that dragged on for 24 hours, leaving us in high dudgeon and some distress by the time we finally got airborne the next day.
The comedy of errors cost Air France some $200,000, by conservative estimates, and I’m still waiting for reimbursement of my expenses.
It could have been a Marx Brothers movie set at Logan Airport when they announced the delay to 300 passengers, most of them French people on their usual short fuse. The announcements were all in English. No one at the gate spoke French although one attendant was Spanish and another looked sort of Chinese.
French men in pastel scarves and women in tight tops and $600 heels ran around in circles trying to grasp what had gone wrong. Words like “mon dieu”, “merde” and “putain de bordel” echoed around the terminal.
My wife and I became the unofficial translators, including the profanity. I was told by Air France PR a few days later that English-only is “normal and appropriate” at departure gates abroad because Air France is now part of an alliance with Delta and KLM. “Only about 60 percent of our passengers are French,” the spokeswoman said. Suddenly Air France is not French. Welcome to the globalization of the airline industry.
At the international terminal, we were instructed to go down two floors, collect our luggage, then come back and stand in line for hotel vouchers. We finally climbed into a cab around 8 p.m.--nearly three hours after we should have taken off.
The Chelsea hotel staff meant well, trying to find room for us all. We were lucky to get one of the last available rooms. As we trundled past the sliding doors toward the elevator, dragging our bags, we saw several groups of worried-looking French people lining up for cabs that were nowhere in sight. In the gloom beyond, the great American post-industrial wasteland loomed. I was so ashamed I pretended to be Canadian.
Privately, as a professional hack, I asked myself several questions. Could the screw be the only problem here? Don’t airlines keep supplies of spare parts handy? What happened to the original screw anyway? Don’t they train staff to handle emergencies like this?
It turned out that it was not one screw but 30 screws that were missing. The screws were designed to secure a piece of metal that improved the aerodynamics of the plane. The plane was an Airbus, made in France, and the screws were unavailable in the United States.
The following day, replacement screws were flown in from Charles De Gaulle Airport. Air France PR said this is the way they prefer to handle such emergencies. When I questioned the exorbitant expense, the spokeswoman said, “We spare no expense in such cases. It is not a question of money.” She acknowledged however that the passenger chaos “might have been better managed”.
Then she suggested I write a letter so they could study the passenger problem and do better next time. Somehow that was not very reassuring.
The mystery deepened as reporters for BloombergNews took an interest in the debacle. Maintenance on the aircraft had been carried out in a cut-rate facility in China, they discovered, and Air France is still busy two weeks later trying to determine who in China walked off with the screws.
I can say as a former PR person that the “communications strategy” is probably the usual –let’s hope this will blow over before the investigation is completed and we have to admit we are incompetent.
©2011 by Michael Johnson. This column first posted Dec. 5. 2011.
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