Sheremetevo and me

For those wanting to see some footage of my time at Sheremetevo here are three clips. This is from when I was already at Gate 25, optimistically listed on the boards right after we passed through customs as the gate from which SU 315 would be departing to New York, albeit at 10pm. The gist is that a crowd had gathered at the front desk of Gate 25 after an announcement was made stating that first, the flight would now be leaving at 11:30, and second, that it would be composed of passengers who had 'registered first' for the flight. The lack of clarity surrounding what this meant--would those who had registered for todays flight SU 315 take precedence, or those left over from the SU 315s of days gone by, i.e., the several hundred people whose flight was canceled on December 26th and who did not, because Aeroflot told them to go home, make onto the flight that ran on December 27th--more than half empty, it was said, so that Aeroflot would be able to post that flights were running as scheduled. No passengers, because they've been sent home, but the flight got out.

So the crowd gathered. There was a crush at the desk--no Aeroflot workers ever appeared at the gate, it should be noted, it was total vigilante airline management at this point--as people pushed and shoved in the belief that whoever made it on the plane would fly. People from the Dec. 26th flight who had been at the bar and just showed up to find a line at the gate got angry. Names were called. At just this moment, the board changed--and SU 315 was now scheduled for 4am. All hell broke loose. A group of young men, and one very loud young woman whose daddy definitely did something fun for a living, who had been nursing a bottle of Hennessy for some time commandeered the microphone making empty threats and demanding to talk to an Aeroflot representative. Attempts to get a gang together to storm customs were made. At that moment, two police officers appeared calm things down and, ideally, shut off the microphone. As can be seen here, they succeeded in neither.

The girl is saying: I just spoke to an Aeroflot representative. She looked at the computer. She said that in total are registered for the flight 324 people. [The rumor circulating was that Aeroflot had registered 600+ for the flight--which was in fact true, they just decided to run two planes. Like Greyhound. The first 11:00am to Boston fills up, they whip out another one.] Here are her words: if you have a boarding pass, you are flying. [The crowd begins to yell in protest, they lie! they lie!]. Yes, we're flying at 4 am [Liars!! for two days liars!!!]. At which point one of the Hennessy lads gets on the line and says, basically, they're all liars, they've been lying for two days, let's not listen to Aeroflot. We want an aeroflot rep to come.

What they didn't know at that moment was that an aeroflot rep was standing right next to them, quietly and efficiently preparing for the flight to hanoi that was about to leave from our erstwhile gate. Shortly after this, she decided to just open up the passenger manifestos for the Dec. 26th and Dec. 28th flights to JFK so that people could see their names on them. Mine was on the 28th. Ben said that when he checked the flight status online this morning, one flight had taken off and one flight, bizarrely listed as traveling between a helipad in Moscow and a helipad in Westchester, had no news available. I suspect, being as my ticket was for the 28th, I would have been on that one.