By Jory Rand

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LOS ANGELES (KABC) – What was supposed to be a routine trip from Europe for a Southern California family turned into a maddening three-day saga of canceled and delayed flights, broken computers and almost no sleep.

And when they thought it was all over and they finally reached Los Angeles, they had the perfect travel nightmare moment: their plane blew a tire as it landed at LAX and had to be towed to the door.

“We just thought, what a classic ending to this crazy saga,” Meera Deo said as she finally landed safely on Los Angeles soil.

His family of four was due to leave Lisbon on Sunday morning and arrive at LAX on Sunday evening.

Instead, they left Portugal on Monday morning and did not return to Los Angeles – after first passing through New York and Atlanta – until Tuesday afternoon.

Their troubles began when Iberia’s computer system crashed on Sunday. They couldn’t get a boarding pass and when they finally did, the agent sent them to the wrong gate, so they missed their first flight.

As the system was down, their only option was to buy new tickets for the next day. So that meant going back to the hotel and back to the airport at 6am the next morning.

They were able to fly from Lisbon to JFK airport in New York, and from there they were supposed to head straight to LAX.

But that flight from New York kept getting pushed back. First it was a two hour wait at JFK. Then six. It was then 10 o’clock. Eventually, the flight was canceled some 12 hours after its supposed departure.

At some point they boarded the plane and waited on the tarmac.

“We got on the flight from JFK to LAX yesterday and then got off. So it was very stressful and frustrating because we thought we were finally going to make that last leg and then we all got off the flight again.

Instead, at midnight, they found themselves driving 40 minutes to a hotel, sleeping about two hours, then returning to JFK at 4 a.m. to catch a 6 a.m. flight to Atlanta.

But even this last step was delayed by three hours.

And of course the final surprise when they landed at LAX.

“The tire blew when he landed – I think we were ready to let him do some humor because we were at home.”

Deo says a supervisor at JFK told him these kinds of snafus happened often over the past six months.

“It’s kind of a comedy of errors, all of these things have continued to go wrong, but they’re also going wrong for a reason. Airlines aren’t ready for the challenges that come this summer.”

This is bad news for Deo, a professor at Southwestern Law School. She barely has time to catch up on sleep before she ends up at LAX on Wednesday, where she is scheduled to fly to a national legal conference.

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