I’m in North Carolina on business. I thought this was going to be easy.

The plane took off from Philly on time. But a few minutes into the flight, the plane started rumbling. My ears began to pop and even my nose started making noise. Kind of like the ear popping noise, but in my sinuses.

I could hear the pressurizing mechanism grinding away, forcing a whoosh of air into the cabin, so I assumed the pressure would even out. It felt like someone was inflating a balloon inside my face. I was pretty tired and even though I was horribly uncomfortable, I shut my eyes and tried to sleep a bit.

Before I knew it, we were descending. I must have fallen asleep. The guy in the seat next to me had just returned from the shitter and he thought he missed out on some sort of announcement. He asked, “Are we stopping over somewhere or are we back in Philly?”

Shit. I thought we were in Raleigh already. I shrugged.

We landed and the pilot made an announcement. The cabin pressure device failed. The backup cabin pressure device failed. The manual backup cabin pressure device failed. Somehow air was escaping from the plane faster than they could pump it in.

They asked us to remain in our seats while mechanics took a look at the plane, then we could take off again. I overheard the guy in front of me talking on his cell phone while we waited. I heard him say, “Yeah, I guess the pilot figured we wouldn’t be able to hold our breath for another hour.”

Another passenger, an older woman, called for the male version of the stewardess to come over. She told him that tiny men crawled inside her ears and started hacking away at her brain with little axes. Or maybe she just told him her ears hurt. One or the other.

After a few minutes, they announced we would have to switch planes. It was now an hour and fifteen minutes after our original scheduled departure time.

All of the luggage had to be moved to a new plane, and all of the passengers had to walk to another gate. We waited there an hour or so, then finally boarded a functional aircraft. A couple hours later, I was standing outside the Raleigh airport waiting for the rental car shuttle. I finally got to the hotel around 1:30am.

So yeah it sucked to get here so late, but at least I learned something:
Cabin pressure is pretty fucking important. It really does prevent your head from exploding.

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