I spent seven hours in the pleasant confines of Dulles International Airport today, thanks to a January storm across parts of the country and its’ disruption to the finely tuned network of arrivals and departures run by United Airlines Express.

There were times during the seven hours that I thought I was becoming the character Tom Hanks played in the movie “The Terminal”, in that I was beginning to believe that I would be trapped in the airport for an indeterminate period of time, unable to leave.

Not because I was a man without a country. (That was the premise of the movie.)

But because I was a man without a plane.

For those of you who don’t travel much, a brief reminder here that United Express is not really United Airlines. The addition of the often-ironic “Express” moniker does not mean that these flights go faster or that they allow you to skip any lines or anything like that.

No, in this case the word “Express” (also known in other airlines as “Connection” or “Eagle”) is not actually even the airline whose name you might think it is. These are actually smaller airline companies with their own names like GoJet, ExpressJet, Republic and my favorite AirWisconsin. The smaller airlines act as feeders to the bigger named parent airline companies.

Which means that you will be flying shorter flights to smaller places or a bigger place with a smaller presence of whatever particular airline, and you’ll probably do it on small 50 to 100 seat planes called “Regional Jets”.

The thing about the “Express/Connection/Eagle” deal is that when the weather messes up one smaller plane in one place, it has an awful domino effect that trickles down the entire schedule, because each flight may be from a different airline working under the parent airline’s name. Thus one plane not taking off can make a traveler catching that same plane as a connection to another city, be in for a very long delay.

A traveler like me.

Despite the infrequent updates to announced delays in our departure time, then the outright cancellation to our first flight, the requisite rebooking to the next flight, then the delays in the rebooked flight, I was patient. Fortunately I was in one end of a large terminal at Dulles, which is a large international airport.

About halfway through the seven hour ordeal, I watched an Air France Airbus 380 arrive from Paris and pull up to the gate to discharge its 500-plus passengers from two different jetways. This plane is mammoth, with three classes of service over two separate floors. It looks a little bit like an ocean liner with wings.

Then they loaded 500 plus people back on the plane and it left again on the return trip to Paris.

I still wasn’t going anywhere.

Rather than lose my patience or end up spending the night at the terminal (or longer if this were the movie), I decided to pull my personal evacuation slide out of this situation. I asked the harried and overwhelmed gate agent in the kindest and sweetest way I knew how, if there was anyway I could rebooked on the first flight out the next day. (To her credit, she was so taken that anyone would ask such a thing in a nice way, she gave me an upgrade to an exit row.)

Then I called my daughter who lives in DC and asked her to come get me. In return, she got a free meal and a trip to the liquor store out of the impromptu visit. I got a comfortable couch for the evening.

And I didn’t end up speaking another language. Or get arrested.

The post script: I finally made it out the next day. About a half-hour late.