My 90-minute American Airlines flight turned into 9-hour hell

When Vince Conley boarded an American Airlines flight from Little Rock, Arkansas to Dallas, Texas on Tuesday, he thought he was in for a smooth ride.

Instead, what was originally supposed to be an easy 90-minute flight turned into a nine-hour hellish ordeal on a cramped plane — but ended happily thanks to good Samaritans.

“I’m like, ‘I feel like we’ve been flying for a long time,’ but you know, you start chit-chatting with people you kind of lose track,” Conley, who flying back home to Texas after a work trip, told The Post.

American Airlines flight 5085 was scheduled to depart at 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 18. But when Conley looked at his phone and saw that the time was 6:30 p.m. — about a half hour after the plane was originally supposed to land at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) — he knew something was awry.

That’s when the pilot told passengers that the plane was diverted to a small airport in Wichita Falls, Texas, due to a severe impending storm, as DFW was not allowing landings or takeoffs.

Rather than disembarking upon landing at 6:45 p.m. at Wichita Falls Regional Airport, Conley and his fellow passengers got stuck on the tarmac for over two hours because airport employees weren’t allowed outside due to the lightning.

But what should have been the flight from hell was really something that turned into a beautiful, human experience, Conley, 38, said.

The “transparent” pilot and the flight attendants were “amazing,” Conley said, with the all passengers stuck on the small plane — a CRJ-900, to be exact, which only has about 79 seats — turning into a team.

“There was this one family that had like a two-year-old and like a three-and-a-half-year-old,” Conley explained. “And those kids were being so good, everyone was complimenting them, and giving the parents credit.”

The man Conley was sitting next to, Joshua Chandler, even put on a pretend duck tour for the young kids, as he had been on one earlier that day, blowing the yellow duck whistle around his neck.

“I didn’t hear anyone where I was down on the plane being negative or crabby, I’m sure it happened here or there but everyone made the best of a really crappy moment,” Conley said.

Finally, the plane was cleared for takeoff, but just as they were about to leave around 9 p.m., the lights on the runway were taken out by the storm and their flight was halted once again.

All of the passengers and cabin crew were forced to deplane at the tiny airport after sitting for nearly five hours.

But that’s when the magic happened.

“As I come in [to the terminal], one of the first guys that got off, he must have bought out half of the vending machine and just had chips and food out for everyone,” Conley said.

Even as Conley tried to buy the snacks from the passenger, the generous man refused and explained that he had bought them for everyone.

The same thing happened when Conley went to get a drink at a different vending machine; Another charitable passenger paid for everyone’s drinks with her own personal credit card.

That wasn’t even the end of the good deeds.

“About a half hour goes by, everyone’s kind of just on their phones, hanging out, waiting on standby, there’s this lady, her name is Angela,” Conley told The Post. “She starts pacing back and forth, she’s like, ‘Yes, yes!’”

It was at that moment that they all saw a Papa Johns’s delivery driver outside the glass doors of the airport, carrying 20 family-sized pizzas to feed all of the passengers, crew and airport staff.

Angela had bought everyone the pizzas and told the unsung heroes at Papa John’s that if they got there within 45 minutes, she would give them a $100 tip — which she did.

Once the pizzas went through security, everyone enjoyed a slice — especially one woman, who shared a long embrace with Angela, telling her that she was saved by the slices.

The whole thing was so emotional, Conley said, that it made him choke up.

“It takes a lot for me to get, like, that emotional, my wife thought I was had a few drinks,” Conley told The Post.

“It was just like the happiness of this really crappy situation, and people making a conscious effort to want to make the best out of it and help each other out and be supportive.”

Finally, around midnight, passengers were able to get back on the flight and they finally landed in Dallas at 1:30 a.m. — but not without Conley exchanging phone numbers with his seatmate.

“I got home just around like 2:30 in the morning, it was a very long day, but it was good,” Conley said.

“It turned out to be a good ending, I guess you can say.”

The Post reached out to American Airlines for comment.