Ahead of Game 3 and with the issues getting out of Florida on Wednesday and into Edmonton, employees of Canadian air traffic didn’t make life much easier on the pilots bringing the Panthers in on their flight.
Staff routing the plane into Edmonton jokingly told the pilots of the Panthers plane they were going to hold the plane in the air until they ran out of gas and had to divert their flight so the team wouldn’t be able to land in Edmonton. The idea being that Canadian air traffic control would give a bit of an assist to their Canadian team as the Oilers are down 2-0 in the Stanley Cup Final series.
You can hear audio of the conversation and then the staff joking as they help the Panthers’ plane safely land.
In the audio clip, the exchange is pretty funny. “I’ve got about a two-hour hold for you or whatever it would take for you to be low enough on fuel that you will have to divert from Edmonton,” said the primary controller. He adds, “Mention this to your passengers and maybe they’ll figure it out.” He then says “Against my better judgment” and gives them the go-ahead to start lowering altitude in preparation for landing.
The clip then jumps to a conversation between air traffic controllers who joked that the primary controller teased the Panthers’ pilots. One says, “You got a score on the hockey game?” and the response is, “Game’s tomorrow.” The primary controller hops on and says the Panthers are just headed into Edmonton right now and when one controller joked he should divert them, he says he threatened to hold them in the air until they were low on fuel, to which the other started laughing.
One other controller hops on and says, “The last call you guys need is Gary Bettman calling the ACC.” The other laughed and said, “That’s true.”
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