shaner,party of 13, your plane is ready

Sometimes people think I'm a slow learner, and truth be told, I probably am. But as I planned my annual spring break mission trip with me and my students from Harding University, I learned a few things along the way that always made next year's trip a little easier.
 
One of those things was when we are enroute to our final mission site destination, we should fly from Belize City down to Punta Gorda where our mission was going to be.  In the past we had driven from Belize City to Punta Gorda or taken a commercial bus. That it's a long drive. But it's only about a 45-minute air flight.

---

I weighed the cost of the time, money, and everything that else went into it, and decided next year we're gonna take our flight from Little Rock, down to Houston, and then Houston to Belize City on our regular commercial airlines. Once we got to Belize City we would charter a Belize Airways flight down to Punta Gorda. Punta Gorda was a small village and a grass strip for a landing runway.
 
I checked into the price of chartering an airplane large enough to take all 13 of us. I then found out why we had never done this before, because WOW, that was very expensive!  I ended up just moving forward to buy 13 tickets individual tickets on one of their standard flights already in their commercial schedule.
 
When I asked how many passenger seats were available for this flight, they were selling tickets for? She responded, “Well there's 13, if you count the co-pilot seat, which will let somebody sit in if we need to. And right now, they are all available.
 
Every seat was available. I realized that I had 13 people in my group and that nobody else on this scheduled flight had bought a ticket!
 
“I'd like to purchase 13 seats on this flight.”   Buying 13 individual seats was far less expensive than chartering a flight. I could tell on the phone the sales rep was kind of raising her eyebrows and scratching her head thinking what am I doing here?
 
After a pause, she simply said, “OK that will be $150.00 per person, each way.” “She added it up, and I gave her my credit card, names, and passport numbers of each of the passengers that would be on the plane with me. That was a lot cheaper than chartering a flight which was I now essentially had.
 
ON THE DAY OF DEPARTURE
After making a successful rendezvous very early in the morning the Friday before spring break, getting everybody’s luggage loaded in the van, driving down to Little Rock, getting everybody checked in on the flight to Houston, getting to the George Bush International Continental airport, and getting on a flight to Belize City we were on our way!
 
We arrived in Belize City and got through security with no problems. We made it to the gate and scattered to get something to eat.  We all got back to our gate to wait for our flight to depart. It was only about 1:15 PM at that time. Our flight didn't leave until 4 o'clock.
 
I walked up to the attendant working at the gate and I asked if the flight that we were going to be on was still a 13 passenger airplane) she looked at her computer looked back at me and said, “Yes it is, how can I help you?” to which I replied, “Well there's 13 in my group on that 4 o'clock flight, we're all here now, why don't we just have that flight leave now instead of at 4:00 p.m.? She looks surprised, that I would ask that question.
 
She said, “Well we have that flight leaving at 4 o'clock that's the one you're on. I replied, “but we're all here now. Do you have a plane in the hanger? Yes, we do she said. I very jokingly said, if yopu will just pull the plane out of the hanger, grab a pilot and send us down there it's only a 45 minute flight. She looks surprised like, what are you talking about?
 
I explained that she could fly us down there, get that plane back here, and sell 13 more seats between now and 4 o'clock when the plane was scheduled to depart... and if they didn't sell any then they're not out any money. And if they sold even two or three, they're probably money ahead.
 
Now I realize that most flight gate attendance aren't the business operations manager, and I didn't expect her to make that decision on her own. But she did say let me check on that, have a seat. I went over and sat with my Group. About 10 minutes later she walked over to me and said, do you have all 13 here now? “Yes, I do.” I told her! Okay, get them up here, we're leaving now. The pilot will be taxing the plane up to this door in a few minutes.
 
I was so smug. I looked at the rest of the group and said, “Try that at American Airlines in Houston!”
 
- 30 -