American Notes Air Travel

"They talk different," was his simple though slightly daft explanation. Before Michael Lewis' Air New Zealand flight from London landed in Los Angeles, the flight attendant told passengers traveling on to Auckland to wait in the lounge until an announcement of the flight. Lewis, hearing "Oakland," complied. When a New Zealand official announced what Lewis thought was the airline's connecting flight to Oakland, he boarded and then settled into his seat for the one-hour flight. Less than ten minutes after takeoff, an elderly woman sitting near him commented that they had 13 more hours of flying time. It began to dawn on Lewis that he might have taken a slight detour. Some 13,000 miles later, after spending twelve hours in New Zealand's largest city, he arrived back in Los Angeles. Lewis, an ingenuous though perhaps a bit flighty student at Sacramento City College, is having his moment in the media sun. He has appeared on the Tonight show ("Auckland is a really nice city," he told Johnny, describing his bus tour), and two major networks are said to be vying for the rights to his accidental odyssey.