Friday, June 30 - At which gate is my flight boarding?!

I seldom run in an airport. I’ve seen other people do it, but the last time I remember doing it myself was in the Paris airport after our inbound flight was delayed, then we had to stand in a very long line to go through a second security check. I normally err on the side of having lots of extra time, so that I don’t need to run. But today I ran in the Addis Ababa airport. Here’s the story:

We arrived in Addis Ababa a little bit later than we were scheduled to, but I still had nearly two hours before my third and final flight was scheduled to leave. I wasn’t sure if I’d have to go through security again or not; that seems to vary from place to place—and perhaps from time to time, depending how recent the last crisis in that place has been. But I figured that, even if I had to go through security, I should be able to make it to my gate well before the time to board.

Coming off the jetbridge after deplaning, being the experienced air traveler that I am, I immediately began looking for a monitor that would show the various flights and the gate where each one would be boarding. Only thing was, I didn’t see any. Some gates were to my left, and others were to my right, but I didn’t know which way to go. I hesitated a few seconds, processing this unexpected turn of events, then mentally flipped a coin and went to the right.

After walking 150 yards or so, I saw my target: a monitor with about 10 lines of text. And sure enough, as I got closer, I could see that each line contained a flight number, a destination city, a departure time, and a status. Only thing was, the flights listed were all leaving in the next 30 minutes. Mine wasn’t scheduled to leave for nearly two hours. To my relief, though, a different screen of data appeared after a minute or two, and these were for later flights. The latest one listed, however, was set to leave about 45 minutes before mine was supposed to. There was no information about my flight. So what to do?

I didn’t see an information kiosk or anyone looking official to ask, but it did seem that I would not have to go through a security checkpoint to get to my gate, whichever one it turned out to be. So I looked for a wall socket where I could charge my tablet, since I’d used it during much of the 13-hour flight and the battery was down to about 30%. Many of the relatively few available outlets were occupied by the plug of a charging cable for a phone, computer, or other device, but I did find one not being used, near Gate 9. (There were 14 gates, according to the posted signs that I could see.) This outlet was within sight of the monitor, where I hoped information about my flight would appear in due time. So I waited for my tablet to charge while I waited for a clue on the monitor about which gate I’d be leaving from.

A few minutes before 9:00 AM—my flight was scheduled to leave at 10:00—I saw “Abidjan” appear on the monitor! But I also saw that dreaded word, “DELAYED,” on the same line! The estimated departure time was 10:20, but most importantly, I now knew which gate I needed to go to in order to catch my flight: Gate 2.

I allowed my tablet to continue charging until a few minutes after 9:00, then I packed it up to head off in search of Gate 2. As it turned out, Gates 1-7 were down a flight of stairs and then proved to consist of a single very large room with seven different exit doors at the ground level. At the appointed time, passengers waiting there boarded a designated shuttle bus, which presumably then took them to their plane located somewhere away from the building, where they got off the bus and boarded the plane.

There was a monitor in that room that was displayed data solely about flights whose passengers were to leave through Gates 1-7. On that monitor, a flight to Tanzania was shown to be boarding through Gate 2 in the not-too-distant future. But it was a bit disconcerting that there was no mention of Abidjan. So I went and looked at the monitor at Gate 2. (Oftentimes, a Gate monitor will show the flight due to board in the near future but also the next one scheduled to leave via that same gate after the current one.) No mention of Abidjan on that monitor either! Hmmm…

I looked for an Ethiopian Airlines employee to ask, but there was a great deal of activity, and they all seemed to be quite busy. So I waited a bit more to see if any signs of a flight to Abidjan would appear around Gate 2, but none did. Then the flight to Tanzania was delayed for an hour, and I struck up a conversation with a man who had been standing in line for that flight. He told me that he lives in Addis Ababa and flies out of that airport on a regular basis, but he told me that he’d never seen things as chaotic as they were today. I asked him what caused the chaos, but he said he didn’t know—just that there was something “big” that had happened, causing security to be heightened, which wreaked havoc on departure schedules. When I mentioned to him the fact that my flight was supposedly leaving from Gate 2, but I couldn’t find any evidence of that anywhere in the vicinity of Gate 2, he suggested that I go back upstairs and make sure they hadn’t switched the gate since I’d last looked at the monitor up there.

That sounded like a reasonable idea, so I took his advice. After a two-minute trek back upstairs (against the flow, since most people left that large room via one of the seven gates and not the stairs leading to Gates 8-14), I verified that the monitor did indeed still indicate that the flight to Abidjan was to board at Gate 2, with an expected departure time of 10:20. So I went back down to the big room to wait some more.

But I thought I’d try to get confirmation from someone who looked knowledgeable, instead of simply relying on the monitor for information. So back down near Gate 2, I stopped an Ethiopian Airlines employee who was walking from one gate to another and wasn’t actually in conversation with someone as she walked. I asked her if the flight to Abidjan would be leaving from one of the gates in that room, explaining my puzzlement because there was no reference to it on the monitor there. She looked at my boarding pass and told me that, yes, it would be boarding through Gate 2. So I hung around Gate 2 and waited some more.

Finally, at 9:45, when a flight to Uganda was being boarded through Gate 2 and there was still no sign of anything happening for my flight there, I asked another employee standing there if this was where the flight to Abidjan would be boarding. His response was shocking! “No,” he said, “the flight to Abidjan is boarding at Gate 14.” He then consulted a piece of paper that he pulled out of his pocket and nodded. “Yes, Gate 14.”

By this time, it was very nearly time for our flight to board, if the plane was indeed going to leave at 10:20. So I once again headed up the stairs, this time at a bit faster pace than the last time I had done it. Gate 14 was the very last gate at the opposite end of the concourse, probably a quarter-mile away, and it was already time to board. I decided that a brisk walk might, just might possibly, get me there a wee bit too late. I don’t like cutting things that close, so I decided to do a very unAfrican thing (in the context of an airport at least)—run.

But first, I took the time to look at the upstairs monitor one last time to see if it was now showing the Abidjan flight as leaving out of Gate 14. But my flight was no longer listed at all!! What on earth did that mean? Had it already left? Would I end up spending the night in the airport? One’s imagination kind of runs wild in situations like that, as you might possibly be able to imagine. But one thing was very clear to me: I was not wrong in my decision to run.

There were a lot of other passengers using that same 12-foot-wide passageway, and most of them were feeling considerably less pressed for time than I was, and quite a few of them were going in the opposite direction to me. So there were numerous times where I had to slow down to a walk until a gap opened up that I could dart through. I could sense the precious seconds slipping away during those times when I had to slow down. It was hard to act patient when I was really not feeling patient at all on the inside. Finally, around Gate 10, the crowd became denser. There was no running here; in fact, it felt like forward progress had slowed to a snail’s pace.

I hadn’t been looking at the individual gate monitors as I ran, but having been forced to slow down to a walk, I did. I was already past the one for Gate 10, but I saw the one for Gate 11 up ahead. But wait a minute! That monitor had my flight number on it, and it said that Abidjan was the destination of the flight being boarded there. Could the man with all the answers on the piece of paper in his pocket have been wrong?! Yes, I decided, given all of the other erroneous information I had seen or been told, he could indeed have been wrong as well. So when I got to Gate 11, I approached one of the employees standing there and, showing her my boarding pass, asked her if I was at the right place. “Yes,” she nodded, “Go stand in one of those lines over there and wait for boarding to begin.” It felt really good by that time to be reasonably sure that I was (finally) in the right place to be able to board my flight.

I’ve flown through the Addis Ababa airport before with Ethiopian Airlines, and I’ve never experienced the degree of uncertainty about where to go that I did today. I think that man I talked to must have been right about “something big” having happened, rendering disorganized a system that is normally quite transparent and easy to make sense of. I don’t know what was going on or what had happened, but I was sure glad that God slowed me down when He did, so that I would see the monitor at Gate 11 and not go dashing right past, all the way to Gate 14, which was not where I needed to go.