Happy landing
Last night as I was talking to my parents on the phone, they asked me if I had heard the breaking news about a JetBlue airplane that was preparing to make an emergency landing at LAX. As you know I’m an airline nut, so after we got off the phone, I followed the story and was later relieved to find out that flight 292 had landed safely.
Apparently, not only was the landing gear not retracting, but the front wheel had become stuck sideways 90 degrees. After circling for a few hours to burn off fuel—what’s sort of surreal is that via the in-seat satellite TV, passengers were able to watch TV news coverage of their flight up until a few minutes before landing—the pilot guided the plane to a perfect landing, and though there were some intermittent flames and smoke as the front wheel scraped along the runway, all the passengers and crew are all right.
It got me to trying to remember if I have been in any kind of airline emergency. I’ve had my share of turbulence and delays, but no emergencies, fortunately. There was this one very minor incident a few years ago, which I can now look back upon with amusement, on a Continental wide-body jet from Houston to LAX: having been upgraded, I was sitting in what was essentially “BusinessFirst” class, and as the plane touched down at LAX and continued down the runway, the rumbling caused a panel above me to dislodge. So there it was hanging over my head. I rang the call button, and a flight attendant came and popped it back into place. There was not a word from him or any of the other passengers, as if nothing happened. I wanted to be like, “Did anyone else just see that?”
Anyone have any interesting inflight stories to share?