I have family members who only fly Jet Blue, and in the last 5 years have never encountered an 'incident'. There's always going to be an exception.

Here's the scoop...

Here is a link that might be useful: stranded....

The worst airline horror story I ever heard was from my friend who was stranded in Gander, Newfoundland for TWO WEEKS!! They had to wait for a part to be delivered. It was Czech Airlines (let that be a lesson to you!) and she was the only one on board who spoke English, except one boy who was bi-lingual. She couldn't even understand the updates when they got them. Although they speak English in Newfoundland, no one could translate the messages in Czech but this one boy who really didn't want to be bothered with her.

Her friends in Prague finally got the American Embassy involved and got her out of there.

I'd go nuts being trapped in a plane.

Hub and I were bound for Puerto Rico with a group of local newspaper and tv reporters and their spouses when the pilot announced that we had to return to the airport because of an "indicator light. Don't worry, folks. We are going to dump our fuel into the lake (Michigan) so we can land safely."

We spent three hours in the airport before reboarding, only to have it happen again! Another plane load of fuel into the lake. Another several hours waiting in the airport! Finally a new plane and crew arrived, but too late for many of our fellow fliers; they refused to board again. (All in our group boarded.)

The airline said they would call our hotel to hold our reservations, but they didn't. When we finally arrived in Puerto Rico in the middle of the night - without our luggage! - we didn't have rooms. Know where our hotel tried to put us up for the night? In the house of ill repute down the street! They drove our group over, but when the men saw the place they said, um, no. We spent the next few hours in the lobby of our original hotel until we were able to get into our rooms.

This was a premier luxury resort on the ocean. Hub is a journalist. We were attending a newspaper convention with about 100 other journalists. Oh boy, did the local reporters have fun filing their
stories that day. The whore house was the perfect finish.

It was a memorable trip, that's for sure!

for us, 99% of the time, flying goes smoothly, but it's the one time that it goes downhill that we remember ! DH takes close to a hundred flights a year, I take at least 25.

Last winter, coming back from Ft Lauderdale to Mtl, ( a 3 hour direct flight)
the flight was 2 hours late, then they made an announcement to pickup our luggage and go back to the counter to rebook, by the time my turn came up,
flights to Mtl were totally booked till the next day, I ended up taking a flight to Ottawa and arranged for a driver to pick me up there, it's a 2 hour drive to Montreal, I left my condo at noon and arrived home in Montreal at 2 in the morning the next day. Waste of time.

As for the jetblue customers being stranded 7 hours, that's pretty horrible,
I can't wait to hear what the company has to say.

Horrible!!! -- but I wonder if the airline simply did not want to pay the necessary "terminal fees" to actually deplane the passengers .... I bet they would never say that bit of truth, of course!

That happened to me in 2000 when I was returning from Europe. We spent seven hours on an Air France plane at de Gaulle with no food, water or bathroom. People were sharing anything they had stashed in their carry-ons with the neediest on board, like the children. We reached New York, exhausted, having missed all of our connections.

At the time, I lived in Louisville, Kentucky. We were able to get a flight into Cincinnati, finally, so I rented a car and we drove from Cincinnati to Louisville. By that time, I had been awake for 36 hours and I was struggling to stay awake enough to drive home. My friend who had gone with me on the trip and I crashed for 18 hours before we both had to leave for our next trip to California the following day.

Later, I learned that the air traffic control system had been out of service in London so all western European flights were delayed. Post-9/11, I started wondering if some terrorist threat had kept us grounded. I guess I'll never know.