Stopover Was Taking-Off Point for Rocky Mountain Low

“What’s the word on the new airport?” I asked a Denver friend last summer, just a few months after it opened.

“It’s great,” he said. “It’s just too bad we don’t need it.”

That’s not the response you expect after someone spends $5 billion for something.

Few subjects have been as controversial in Denver in recent years as the Denver International Airport. The national media have written about it, often critically or derisively. Former Denver Mayor (and current U.S. Secretary of Transportation) Federico Pena has appeared on “Nightline” to defend it as a state-of-the-art public works project. Early on, planners touted the new baggage system as revolutionary, only to stand by horrified when test runs resulted in luggage flying every which way. Repeated delays of the airport’s scheduled opening only added to the confusion over whether the airport was coming to town or the circus.

It didn’t help last summer when a man dozed off on one of the revolving oversized luggage bins and was crushed to death.

So, it was an obvious question to ask my Denver friend. But it’s one thing to discuss an airport while playing golf on a bright June day, and quite another to contemplate it in the midst of a late-night ground blizzard, which I encountered Sunday on what was supposed to be a 45-minute stopover en route to Orange County.

At the old Denver airport, stopovers had a way of, shall we say, stretching out. Some Broadway shows didn’t last as long as delays at the old Stapleton Airport. Many stranded passengers eventually had their mail sent there.

That may have been why I started feeling edgy Sunday afternoon in Omaha, while visiting friends and watching a football game played in Denver. “Looks like snow,” I said at one point, as the Denver weather worsened. Before long, misdirected John Elway passes were flying every which way--just like, well, luggage. A beautiful snowy sight, unless you were scheduled to fly into Denver that night.

Not to worry, I thought. The new airport was built to handle just such conditions.

Well, let me tell ya.

The good news is that we landed on schedule. Our captain told us another plane was at our gate, though, and it would be 15 minutes before we disembarked.

Those minutes passed rather quickly, it seemed. The captain said there would be a further delay, explaining that the bad weather had tied up flights and that our wide-body plane needed a bigger gate than other planes. He asked us to be patient.

Two and a half hours after touchdown, we rolled up to the gate.

Once in the terminal, I was shocked and buoyed to see the blinking “Boarding” sign for my Orange County flight. It was a mere 16 gates away, and off I ran. Sixteen gates in the new airport proved to be the rough equivalent of the metric mile, but I got there, wheezing like a tea kettle and with a searing pain in my chest.

None of that mattered until the airline attendant informed me that the Orange County flight had been canceled and that this flight was going to Phoenix. Only because I could scarcely draw a breath did I not ask why they couldn’t have posted that news on the departures screen. Instead, I just asked, “Now what?” and the attendant directed me to the customer service center--nine gates back in the opposite direction.

A few dozen people were assembled there, and that was when I gave up the ghost for the night. You all know the feeling--a certainty that things will get worse from that point on.

For me, that consisted of being dropped off later that night at Space 57 of the rental car lot. “That’s your car,” the shuttle driver said. “Where?” I asked, seeing only a large mound of something under a pile of snow and ice.

He gave me a scraper and bade me good evening. Clad in tennies, light slacks and a sweat shirt, I began searching for the car. It was about 11:30 p.m., and the wind was blowing, oh, about 120 miles an hour. It was probably 20 degrees. It was the kind of storm where the snow blows sideways. In other words, the kind of storm that convinces people to move to California.

I unthawed the car and joined the caravan of people leaving the airport at 20 m.p.h., a speed dictated by the fact that you couldn’t see squat. Sometimes, to see, it was necessary to roll down the window--an always pleasant experience during ground-blizzard conditions.

I wasn’t killed, and I’m not even upset anymore. I flew home Monday morning without incident, only to learn how bad things really got that night.

A United Airlines pilot diverted his landing at the last minute when he saw a truck parked on the runway. The truck wasn’t supposed to be there, but it was. A ground radar system was the culprit, the FAA announced Tuesday.

A friend in Denver said the problem was that the roof in the control tower caved in. When I phoned her Tuesday afternoon for an update, she reported that a controller in the control tower had just been beaned by a falling tile.

That’s as up-to-the-minute news as I can provide.

But rest assured that as events unfold, I’ll keep you posted on how the state-of-the-art airport is working out.