Reflecting on delay
Arriving back in the US I see my colleagues on the trip have been keeping eveyone up to date on (Suzanne has to explain that Turkish Delight is a local delicacy! - CNN readers plainly not as travelled as Christiane Amanpour).
But none that I have seen has broached the topic of why we endured a further delay even after the captain's chair was fixed. The issue - seriously - was that the chair had not been properly certified, so we were kept on the ground for three hours while senior administration figures at first gripped their FTs and dreamed of being on Air Force One and then took control of the situation as diplomats are meant to and called everyone they had ever known who knew anything about Turkey to get us out. It was quite a scene: "We have xxxxxxx on board and I know he will be personally grateful to whoever clears up this mess" among the lines I heard; a nice mixture of carrot and (implied) stick. Some discussion about whether all of it was a plot by the French to punish the Obama team for being so keen on getting Turkey into the EU when their airports are still run with, shall we say, the inflexibility of the closed market.
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