Impressively, This is a First

My brother is coming to visit. He forwarded me his itinerary, which had the date January 18th written on the top. I checked the flight information. I checked the time. I put it all on my calendar. I told the girls - we counted down every day for the last week. I told Dave - he moved his schedule around, and pushed everything forward yesterday.

Dave got home right on time. The girls had their shoes and coats on. We've got our passes in our pockets, ready to take the Metro out to the airport and meet Uncle Adam. And then Dave says,

Do you wanna make sure his flight will arrive on time?

Good idea, I says.

So I log onto Northwest Airlines' website, and put in his flight number.

It says there is no such flight number today.

So then I start to get mad. Its time for us to be rushing out the door, and this stupid website won't process a simple flight number.

I move back to the itinerary Adam emailed to me. I find the flight number. I don't look at the date - why would I? I copy the flight number, and paste it into Northwest's website.

It still says there is no such flight number today.

Okay, now I'm getting really mad. This is ridiculous - an obvious next failure of the airline industry. They can't even run a simple website to track incoming flights?

I search for the flight by city. I say he's flying from Chicago to Shanghai.

The website says he would fly from Chicago to Detroit today, and then fly from Detroit to Shanghai - landing tomorrow.

Still not processing a date error, I see that I've entered the wrong city. But I had the right flight number! So, I now search for the flight by the correct city. I say he's flying from Detroit to Shanghai.

And this is where my heart skipped a beat.

Without any dispute, his flight would not be arriving that evening.

I checked his itinerary.

True enough. He left Kansas City on January 18th, to arrive in Shanghai on January 19th.

And the interesting question here is,

Had we not checked the flight information, we would not have known his flight would not arrive today.
How long would we have waited at the airport for him to walk through the customs doors?