Thank Your Lucky Stars You Weren’t On This 30-Hour Nightmare Of A Flight

When passengers boarded Delta flight 944 in the Dominican Republic on Monday afternoon, they expected to land at New York's JFK airport about four hours later. Instead, they were taken for a serious ride.

The New York Post reports that, due to a series of maddening mishaps, it wound up taking 30 hours for travelers to get back to New York. Yes, 30 hours. It all started when the plane was circling JFK airport, waiting for clearance to land. Because the aircraft was running low on fuel, the pilot was forced to divert to Manchester, NH. And since that airport doesn't typically handle international flights, the plane then sat on the tarmac — in the snow — for two hours, while customs agents drove there from somewhere else.

Passengers disembarked and spent the night in New Hampshire, and then boarded another flight bound for JFK on Tuesday morning. But serious turbulence (bad enough that several people became airsick) forced the plane to divert yet again, this time to Boston. When the passengers finally arrived at JFK, it was 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, approximately 30 hours after the initial departure.

Lauren Karasek, who was on the flight, live-tweeted the whole experience. To make matters worse, Delta wasn't exactly falling all over itself to compensate passengers for the ordeal.

Knowing that the airline is "very sorry for the inconvenience" makes losing an entire day totally worth it, right?