Post #118577 by TikiGoon on Thu, Oct 7, 2004 2:37 PM

Almost drown twice.

Almost hung twice. (Accident while playing, both times, no death wish here!)

One emergency landing

I will elaborate on the emergency landing, because it is more in line with the board and it was the only time I came close to death as an adult. My wife and I were headed to Maui for our honeymoon. The second leg of our flight was going from Atlanta to the big island. I don’t remember what type of plane it was, but it had a large screen showing a map and an image of the plane on the map. About 45 minutes into the flight, the plane shuttered. I didn’t think much of it. Turbulence is what it is. Then the plane started banking and eventually on the monitor we saw the plane was now headed back to Atlanta. A puzzled look came across most of the people around us. One of the flight attendants walked back to the monitor and turned it off, not saying a word and avoiding any eye contact with the passengers. Everyone started chattering and wanted to know what was going on. About 10 minutes after the monitor was turned off the pilot made an announcement. I don’t remember his exact words but he said that fire sensor for one of the engines had lit up and he had gone ahead and shut that engine down. He then began to assure us that the plane can function on the remaining engines, but we had to immediately return to Atlanta. My wife asked me if they were kidding. I told her that that is not exactly the kind of thing they kid about. We had a full load of fuel to get to Hawaii, which is not easy or safe to land with. After we got closer to Atlanta we had to circle around for about 25 minutes dumping our fuel. The pilot made a few more announcements. One of the more memorable announcements was the one letting us know that it is normal to have emergency equipment on the runway for an emergency landing. My wife about had a cow! We made our landing and shortly after the tires hit the runway, everyone cheered.

I guess every time you get on a plane you could be thinking well this could be it. I had never felt this way until the pilot made the announcement about the fire sensor. Unlike the other times when I came close to death, I never had so much time to think about it. I wasn’t scared, I was just sad because there was so much more I wanted to do before I died.