..., and 2-1/2 hours in, we turned around because an engine failed!

It was pretty funny. I noticed it before the flight attendants had been notified. I saw it on the monitors just as they were preparing the duty-free carts. I tapped one of the attendants on the shoulder and asked if we were turning around. The map showed that our start and end were DTW and that we had done a U-turn over Hudson Bay with a course plotted for DTW. He assured me that we would have felt it if we had turned around and that the nav system must have made a mistake. I didn't believe him and it certainly wouldn't have made me feel better to hear that the nav system had a problem, but I figured we would find out soon enough. Well, I fell asleep and woke up to the announcement that we would be back in DTW in an hour along with the reason.

I have to say that Northwest did a wonderful job of handling everything. They had a new 747 waiting when we got back. They had meal and travel vouchers printed and waiting. They called a new flight crew out of bed; all but three of the existing crew chose to bail rather than go over their hours. By the time I got on the plane, they had figured out a new itinerary for me (twice, actually) and e-mailed it to Suka for me.

The ultimate destination for the flight was Manila via Nagoya, so there were a lot of languages to deal with. They announced almost everything in English, Tagalog and Japanese. There were still some language issues. There weren't enough Tagalog speakers to go around. I helped a couple of people, two Tagalog speakers and one French-Canadian, whose English was decent but fell apart a little in difficult circumstances to figure out what was going on. I certainly remember how it felt when my train from Amsterdam to Gent was interrupted by a lightning strike on the tracks and I got through largely due to the helpfulness of some Dutch and Flemish fellow travellers.

Another interesting aspect of the flight was the passengers. One lady sitting in my row had her 7 month old daughter with her. She was returning to the Philippines because her sick mother was waiting to die until she could see her daughter again and the baby for the first time. The baby was very well behaved and I slept like a rock anyway.

Also, a band called The Click Five was on the plane starting a tour of southeast Asia in Manila. They had their guitars and other instruments with them. I chatted with one of the band members for awhile. They had a song on Now, Volume 20 that one of my seat mates had on her iPod, so I got to hear their stuff.