My last flight out of this airport was a real doozy. I was returning home with my 4-year old daughter Karen after taking her up to visit my former-in-laws after a divorce earlier in the year. We were booked on a twin-engine propeller commuter-type aircraft to New York-LaGuardia that was scheduled to depart at 7:00am on August 3, 1981 and we were to transfer to an Eastern Airlines Airbus A300 flight from LaGuardia to Miami.

Unfortunately at the exact same time and date the PATCO union representing FAA air traffic controllers went out on strike. We were already boarded on the flight with engines running and waiting for taxi clearance when the captain shut the engines down and told us that the air traffic controllers had gone out on strike and we would have to return to the terminal and wait for further developments. About 15 or 20 of us disembarked the aircraft and we were walking toward the terminal when someone noticed a black air traffic controller outside of the tower cab on the catwalk and he was giving us the finger. Several of us males in the group yelled an obscenity to the controller and shot double birds back at him with both of our hands. We entered the terminal and sat in the gate's chairs and shortly thereafter the captain made an announcement that we were going to depart. Apparently the supervisor of the tower came in and he was handling air traffic control.

We departed with no problems and made our way down to LaGuardia, which was a real cluster with airplanes all over the place on taxiways. Fortunately we were able to taxi to our gate and we got out to enter the terminal which was chock full of confused people. We checked in at our Eastern gate and we boarded the flight to depart on time. We pushed back on time and then proceeded to a taxiway on the north side of the airport and sat in a long line of aircraft waiting to take off. The captain shut the engines down and had the APU running for power, air-conditioning, etc. He had the flight attendants start serving us drinks for free and announced that smokers could light up in the smoking sections. The scene would be something like viewing the Twilight Zone if people now could see it.

After 2 or 3 hours on the taxiway we started up and took position on a runway for takeoff. We had a bizarre flight routing down to Miami with a lot of considerably sharp turns left or right all the way down to MIA. I was thankful that we made it safely back home despite all the ATC problems.