Notes from a two-day detour, and a brief field guide to the collapse
By Omar Nabil Metwally, MD
Written and published from a plane with its engines turned off on the runway, and no ETA.
“This is real. I am really here.”
— Gate B33, John F. Kennedy Airport
The Cast
The Bulbul my father. A physician. Dreams of a home by the water.
Mom (Louly) awake since 6am, on the phone since midnight.
Me the son. The reason for the trip.
Siblings the chorus, texting from a safe distance.
Part One
The Detour
In which a family goes to New York for a piece of paper.
I
The Errand
We came to New York for a piece of paper. Military exemption paperwork, to be filed at the Egyptian consulate, in person, because some things still require a body in a room.
The consulate visit was brief and uncomplicated. That is the last sentence in this story that will be either of those things.
II
The Logic of a Physician
Before the consulate visit, I enjoyed kombucha at a cafe across the street. On the back of the can, a founder’s story: an infectious disease physician who met his wife on his way to the West African Ebola outbreak, and who now brews wellness without compromise.
Bulbul: What a wasted career. Kombucha is bland without the spice of pain.
⸻
Bulbul didn’t actually speak the above words. I am paraphrasing and synthesizing decades of wisdom that he’s instilled in me. Mom asked if I wanted milk in my cappuccino. Mom has not slept in a long time. Neither have I. It reminds me of how she used to order steak at Red Robin: well done but not too dry, medium well without the pink.
Bulbul says he’s always dreamed of a home by the water. I tell him I want to live in the mountains.
He suggests Tennessee. I ask him why Tennessee. If he’s ever been to Tennessee.
He says no. But I hear it’s gorgeous.
“Where then, if not Tennessee?” he asks. “Arkansas?”
And slowly I began understanding the logic of this man. My father. The logic of a physician.
That’s the thing about doctors. Too naive.
Later, on the way in, Bulbul slipped and called the consulate the pharmacy. He has not slept in a long time. Neither have I. I silently hope he wouldn’t walk inside asking for controlled substances.
III
The Cancellation
Then Delta began its slow work. A delay, and another, and another after that, each one announced with the confidence of a thing that would not happen again. At 2am the flight was cancelled outright. The ground staff had no information, no plan, and no visible theory of what an airline is for.
Mom had a system shutdown with her eyes open, holding the iPhone to her head with one hand, gazing at a crowd of angry Delta passengers trying to grasp what was happening to them.
By morning, Mom and Dad were still trying to find a flight to DTW. I was in a Lyft on the way to JFK.
NYC captives.
⸻
In a desperate act of love for one’s child, Mom bought the last ticket to Detroit, sacrificing herself and the Bulbul for their son.
And so they set out on their new life in Chinatown, wondering if they’ll ever see their children again. If anyone will remember.
IV
That’s Your Bed. This Is Mine.
Poor Mom. She was beyond exhausted last night. We had a really sweet Bengali Lyft driver, and Mom fell asleep listening to me talk to her.
The hotel — a nice and expensive SoHo hotel, for the record — is where Mom’s discomfort became obvious. She asked if there are bed bugs here.
The Bulbul asked with sincere concern: “What are you afraid of, rapists?”
And for a moment, I wondered if I should be afraid too. But I was too tired. I simply told the Bulbul, waving at Mom’s bed: “That’s your bed. This is mine.”
Sibling T: “Mom’s worst nightmare.” · Sibling U: “I told her to sleep at my place tonight.” · Me: “I told her the same.”
V
Morning in Chinatown
The Bulbul woke up at 10am, scratched his balls, and went back to sleep. Louly had been awake since 6am and on the phone since midnight.
I walk through vibrant, endlessly fascinating Chinatown — open air markets, tai chi in the park, the sounds, scents, and colors of life — and have coffee at a Vietnamese cafe. Between a Grab bike helmet and condensed milk cans, a hardcover book commands my attention: KIM JONG IL LOOKING AT THINGS. The Supreme Leader in a field of green wheat, generals arranged behind him like a hedge, all of them looking at things.
I flip through it while waiting for my coffee. It seemed like the correct souvenir from a week in which nobody in charge of anything was looking at anything.
Seriously though, Chinatown is endlessly fascinating. The mental stimulation was almost worth the pain.
⸻
VI
To the South
And now I am listening to the undulating breaths of the peaceful young Korean man taking me to freedom.
To the south. Where I am free to try, and to fail, and to keep trying.
VII
Gate B33, Terminal 4, John F. Kennedy Airport
This is real. I am really here.
Look closely and you’ll see a young woman with a travel pillow hugging her neck. She is crying. Not tears of sadness or fear — that was hours ago. These are tears of joy and relief.
And just out of view, to my right, is a veiled Arab woman wearing sunglasses and munching potato chips. She has witnessed true hardship in her life. Her family has lost everything, twice, and started over three times. To her, it’s another beautiful day in NYC, and yesterday’s detour an almost imperceptible inconvenience.
The paperwork, by the way, went through without a problem. It was the only institution all week that did what it said it would do, and it belonged to another country.
Part Two
The Failed State
In which the delay turns out not to be about Delta.
VIII
Not Enough Human Workers
For thirty-six hours I believed this was a Delta problem — a private failure, the kind you can be compensated for with a voucher. Then the article came through the chat.
Air traffic controllers had called out sick in unusual numbers. Thunderstorms did the rest. Equipment failed at a few hubs, apparently on principle. The FAA answered with ground stops at eight major Northeast airports, and the Transportation Secretary went on television to advise the nation to brace for more of the same, in the tone of a man reporting the weather rather than the forecast he himself commissioned.
The fix is on the books: 8,900 new controllers, hired by 2028. A promise scheduled to arrive several years after the problem — the national genre, really. In the meantime the system is short a few thousand people and runs on mandatory overtime, six-day weeks, and the private decency of individuals who have been given no other tools.
ATC staffing issue. There’s literally not enough human workers to safely direct air traffic.
⸻
That sentence should stop a country cold. It didn’t. It scrolled past between a sports score and an ad.
This is what a failed state looks like in a rich country. Not rubble. Not sirens. A terminal at 2am, fully lit, air-conditioned, staffed by people in uniform who have been instructed to know nothing, while four hundred citizens refresh an app that has also been instructed to know nothing. The infrastructure is immaculate. The thing it was built to do has quietly stopped happening.
They turned the engine off.
IX
The Marinade
By hour six a terminal stops being a place you pass through and becomes a room you live in. The lighting does not dim. The chairs are bolted at a distance calculated to prevent sleep. There is one working outlet for every forty citizens, and the man who found it first is now a landlord.
A gate agent has been issued a script containing four sentences, none of which contain information. A man in a wedding suit is explaining to her that the wedding is his. A woman with three children under six is being told that the hotel voucher system is experiencing high volume. Somewhere a screen updates DELAYED to DELAYED, which is a design achievement nobody has yet been fired for.
Around 1am the tone changes. It is not really a decision anyone makes. A phone gets thrown. Somebody climbs onto the counter to address the crowd, as if the crowd were the problem. A bank of chairs goes over. Four hundred adults who have been standing in a line for nine hours discover that the line was the only thing holding them.
And then the police — who, unlike the airline, are never understaffed. They arrive fast, in numbers, kitted out, radios working, systems online, budget intact. They have no flights either. What they have is authority.
Pepper spray, marinate, simmer down.
⸻
It deserves the culinary vocabulary it has earned, because that is precisely the procedure. The crowd is not dispersed; one angry passenger is arrested and made an example of— and then the room is left to rest. Coughing counts as agitation. By 3am it has simmered down to a low, even sorrow that requires no further attention from management, which was always the desired doneness.
Note the division of labor. The country could not find enough people to safely direct airplanes. It found thirty of them in eleven minutes to help the passengers simmer down. This is not incompetence — incompetence is random, and this is not random. This is a budget. Somebody sat in a room and decided which of those two capacities the republic would keep funded, and they were not confused about it, and they were correct about what they would need.
Terminal Braise
Serves 400. Total time: 9 hours, plus resting.
| 400 travelers | Room temperature. Do not let them settle; bolt the seating so it cannot be reclined. |
| 1 cancelled flight | Announced at 2am, off-menu, no substitutions. |
| 4 gate agents | Deboned of all information. Keep visible — they absorb the heat. |
| Fluorescent light | Full, continuous, no dimmer. Prevents the mixture from setting. |
| 1 outlet per 40 guests | For tension. Encourages the crowd to season itself. |
| Capsaicin, to taste | Applied as a fine mist, evenly, without regard to which portions were already tender. |
| Method | Delay. Reduce. Agitate. Season generously. Rest until quiet. Serve at 6am to a connecting flight that has also been cancelled. |
X
A Modest Proposal, Aviation Edition
I wondered aloud in the chat what would happen if healthcare workers used this strategy.
The answer, I think, is nothing. Nothing visible. That is precisely the problem, and it is the difference between the two collapses.
When aviation fails, it fails all at once and in public. Eight airports go dark on a map. Cancellations aggregate into a number a news desk can put in a headline. A cabinet secretary must appear on a Sunday program and say a sentence. The failure has a shape, a location, and a spokesman.
When healthcare fails, it fails one person at a time, in private, at a pace slow enough to be mistaken for normal life. Nobody issues a ground stop. There is no board of red CANCELLED beside every name. There is a voicemail about prior authorization. There is a first available appointment in March. There is the 6th bill that arrives twelve months later, itemized in a language invented specifically so that it cannot be disputed. There is a man in a parking lot rationing an injection because the alternative is his daughter’s tuition.
The Bulbul has practiced medicine for decades. He has never once been able to call in sick in a way the country would feel. Nobody would ground a single flight. The delay would simply be distributed — to a waiting room, to a hallway bed, to a phone tree, to the exhausted — which is where it has been distributed the entire time.
The system does not lack a plan. Distributing the failure onto individuals is the plan.
⸻
XI
The DIY Healthcare Kit
So the market has done what markets do when a public good stops arriving. It has packaged the absence and sold it back, at retail, with free shipping over $35.
What follows is the standard household kit as currently assembled by roughly everyone I know. Contents may vary by state, by employer, and by whether your father is a physician.
Contents of the Kit
| One (1) laminated card | Reads: HAVE YOU TRIED DRINKING WATER AND GETTING MORE SLEEP. Doubles as an ice scraper. |
| Search engine, unlimited | For self-diagnosis. Every symptom resolves to either dehydration or something with a five-year survival rate. There is no third result. |
| Chatbot triage, free tier | Twenty messages a day. Endlessly patient, faintly hedging, available at 3am — which is more than can be said for the on-call line, and it does not bill you. |
| Veterinary-grade supplies | Sutures, saline, antibiotics labeled FOR AQUARIUM USE ONLY. The fish are, notably, not asked for a copay. |
| Prior authorization dice | Roll for coverage. On a 1, the medication your physician selected is denied by someone who has not attended medical school and will not be identified. |
| A friend who is a nurse | Not included. Must be sourced independently. Answers texts at all hours, unpaid, and is the actual load-bearing element of this kit. |
| One (1) GoFundMe template | Pre-filled. Optimized for the photograph in which you still look well. A stranger’s pity, priced at a 2.9% processing fee, is now a recognized payer. |
| Insulin, one vial | Financed over thirty-six months. Also available same-day, six hours south, in a country the kit does not name. |
| Blood pressure cuff, imported | Ships from Shenzhen in nine days. The one in the clinic came from the same warehouse. Yours cost less. |
| A physician father, if available | The Bulbul model. Diagnoses by WhatsApp, opinions unlimited, second opinions free, has never billed a member of his own family or, judging by his lifestyle, most of yours. |
| Meal voucher, $15 | Valid only at a terminal restaurant that closed in 2019. Included for continuity with the aviation module. |
This kit is not a substitute for medical care. Neither, increasingly, is medical care. Some assembly required; all assembly required; you are the assembly.
XII
Coda, Gate B33
So: a family stranded overnight by an air traffic system that has run out of people, in a country that will hire them in two years, in an airport whose staff were forbidden the dignity of an explanation and whose only fully funded service arrived at 1am with a canister. A woman crying with relief because a plane exists. A woman eating potato chips who has calibrated hardship against an actual war and finds this an almost imperceptible inconvenience. Both of them are right. That is the strangest part.
You can be a captive of a failing system and still be the luckiest person in the terminal. Both things run on the same track. Empire ends the way our flight ended — not with a bang, but with a gate agent who does not have the information, and a crowd that has learned not to ask twice.
And still: to the Midwest. Where I am free to try, and to fail, and to keep trying — which, when the machinery stops, is the entire remaining infrastructure, and which is why we came for the piece of paper in the first place.
The consulate visit was brief and uncomplicated.