I recently embarked on X airline’s first-ever Halloween Charter flight…and dear god I hope it was their last.

I’m not sure about the men and women who sat up in that boardroom one sweltering summer day, as they hatched plans for fall functions for their airline. I’m not sure about them as marketing strategists or people, because I have never once gagged my way through carving a pumpkin with my ungrateful kids who inevitably make me do all the work and thought to myself, “Gee, I’d really like to hitch a ride in this slimy gourd’s husk.”

But for some reason, some orange and unholy reason, someone did think that, and so, as the local paper’s review guy I had to trek aboard (some might say a-gourd) the behemoth orange ball we call The Great Pumpkin.

This is an enchanted (or perhaps cursed) holiday apparition, not a vessel of flight

A bit of a misnomer, since, great it most certainly was not.

Consider the logistics for a minute. This thing is a freaking PUMPKIN. It wasn’t designed for air travel- it was designed to slowly ascend over a chosen and blessed pumpkin patch on All Hallow’s Eve for like, 20 minutes tops, before rumbling back to the ground to slumber another year.

When I sit back (with legs blessedly outstretched) and think of the potential lawsuits alone, I shudder to think. It’s not like it’s equipped with seatbelts. They had us packed in like pumpkin seeds, how you gonna assume the brace position when you’re huddled up crisscross-applesauce basically on top of your neighbors as the cylindrical vessel you’re aboard hurtles 50 feet off the ground at 5 miles an hour

That’s another thing- they didn’t even try to install a temporary motor. I’m not sure of the efficacy of such an attempt, and also you’d have to take The GP’s pain threshold into account when considering such modifications, but what about MY pain? That of my family?

It took us 16 godforsaken hours to go from Dallas to McAllen. They thought we died. My wife tried to cash in my life insurance. Now we’re in counseling and I sleep with bear spray under my bed because that was awful fast, Helen. My kids won’t come near me because I smell like rotting squash, and they think I’m a zombie.

Oh an the service on board, where do I even begin. When the flight attendants weren’t slipping all over the stringy, slimy interior, their shoes were becoming lodged in the very walls. Again, this is a pumpkin. It is porous and wet, and whatever team this airline hired beforehand didn’t get all the string bits out which I know is impossible- I struggle every year, but I’m not also out there trying to shove people inside my shoddy attempt at carving.

I get that they were trying to go for a “farm to pumpkin/plane” deal, but to only serve roasted pumpkin seeds and pumpkin juice on a 16 hour “flight”…if you’re ever looking for an alternative punishment to solitary confinement, I think I’ve got it. The seeds might have been good. We’ll never know. They were impossible to eat; as big as a Buick and twice as tough. What part of “Great Pumpkin” did no one understand? Great meaning big, not great as is wonderful because this was to wonderful what up is to down- opposite.

I’m not even going to rate this with my usual guide- I’m not going to rate this at all. This is a safety disaster waiting to happen, please do not do this again, and if this airline does end up disturbing the sanctity and structural integrity of The Great Pumpkin again by packing 200 unknowing participants inside the squishy squash hull, may God have mercy on their souls.

Happy Halloween!