[PilotMan]

Last night was one of those nights that you write about.

Day 2 of a 4 day trip we left from Guatemala City in the afternoon. I was watching the NDSU game Watch ESPN on my laptop through a proxy and I was only supposed to get to see the first half, but I saw our inbound was delayed by almost an hour. I convinced the Captain to get our ride delayed so I could watch more, ended up with an extra 45 min out of it. That's really neither here nor there, and neither is NDSU winning it's 6th FCS championship in 7 years. GO BISON!!!!

Ok, that's out of my system now. We're over 3.5 hours into our flight, just getting down to 10,000ft and about to get into the arrivals flow for the approach when the FA calls up and says that we have a medical issue. A girl in the back has been passing stones and she's been bleeding. Her parents were split on the need to get the FA's involved but the mom won out and they wanted on the ground. ATC was helpful about expediting us to the front of the line, although if we had declared an emergency, I could have saved us at least 6 or 7 minutes, but you take what you can get when it's not an explicit emergency, and we were going to be on the ground in pretty short order anyway. There's not a whole lot more to gain with an emergency.

We land and Newark is struggling. Still recovering from the big weather system last Thursday that saw the airport shut down for a day. But it really lasted through yesterday. The wind had forced the airport into a configuration that drastically limits the number of arrivals per hour. So the recovery wasn't really happening fast anyway. As an international arrival there are only a few gates we can come into due to customs and despite letting everyone know ahead of time that we were time critical, there was no gate space. In retrospect, our extra 10 minutes of waiting was nothing, but at the time it really sucked.

The next flight was a short one up to Portland Maine. That plane had been on the ground since 8pm, inbound from international too, but they waited almost 3 full hours for a gate. Like I said, it wasn't pretty. Because of all of the delays, crews were timing out here and there. By the time we got our plane our FA's were about an hour from timing out. On top of that, they catered the wrong plane, and maintenance thought that our plane was staying overnight, and it had a write up that had to be fixed before we could leave. Needless to say, all those things meant a lot of coordination and a lot of things that are completely out of my control until other people make decisions. The plane needed catered, and for some reason, they only catered the front when they came, so we had to wait for them to come and do the back. It's one of those head scratchers. When it rains it pours and it never feels like anything is going right.

The company decides they need to replace our FA's as the delay wears on. We have 4. They get one replacement from one who had just shown up for short call and they pulled another who was expecting to work an overnight to Santo Domingo and back. The other 2 were pulled from an overnight flight to London. Now all of them were going to Portland Maine for 30 hours. None of them had worked a domestic narrow body trip in years. So there was a lot of complaining and a lot of laughing because they were out of their element.

The best part was the FA who had just showed up hadn't been to Portland before and even though our flight was only an hour, didn't realize that we weren't going to Oregon until we had almost landed. Aside from landing at 200a and a few hours late, it was all rather amusing for us.

Before we left, I took time and walked the cabin talking to passengers and trying to apologize, answering questions and reassuring people that we were indeed going to leave and get them there. Thank god I didn't end up looking like a liar. We got going, I got some shortcuts from Boston Center and we landed in Portland, well after the control tower had closed. I haven't made position reports landing at an uncontrolled field for a few years.

That basically means that the airspace in the area is uncontrolled. We're cleared for a visual approach and it's our responsibility to watch for traffic and communicate our position and intentions. Boston Center told us that there was no traffic on their radar in the area before they let us go, and they can't clear another aircraft on an approach until we call them back and let them know we're on the ground and off the runway. I do that and we taxi into the frigid cold night.