
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.