Flight 6
Doses of Double Trouble While Flying
I have survived my very own “William Shatner on the airplane” Twilight Zone episodes.
Throughout my career, I have embarked on hundreds of flights, most of them international, primarily from North America to destinations in Europe, the Middle East, South America, and the Far East. I have had a few unfortunate in-flight incidences. I am certainly not the most traveled businessman, but I suspect the ratio of my incidents to flights undertaken is higher than most. Why? I am not sure—perhaps it is just dumb luck.
On a Sunday morning in 1980, with clear, bright skies, I took off from San Francisco Airport, heading for Montreal. I had spent Christmas week visiting my parents, who at the time lived in San Francisco. On Saturday night, my parents and I had dinner at one of the city’s long-established restaurants. Dad and I had ordered a couple of bottles of wine; he was introducing me to Kistler, his favorite American white. As a result, I was a little groggy the following morning when I boarded the plane and made my way to my seat, located on the right side well, to the rear of the aircraft.
It was an early version of the DC-9, owned by American Airlines. It was a rather long and narrow-looking plane, with a single center aisle and two seats on the left side of the aircraft and three on the right. I had a window seat, with an older woman sitting in the aisle seat next to me, and no one between us. The flight was about three-quarters full.
The DC-9 was built by the Douglas Aircraft Company, and through various iterations, the plane was in service for well over thirty years. There was one tail-mounted jet engine on either side of the fuselage, and from my seat window, which was located behind the back of the starboard wing, I could just see the front of the jet engine. As the plane taxied down the runway, I settled into my seat and looked out as the tarmac beneath started to rush by. Less than a minute into the climb, that right-side engine exploded: a loud bang could be heard, and a shudder was felt throughout the aircraft. As I looked out the window over my right shoulder, I could see a trail of smoke coming from the engine. The plane immediately leveled off, at what I would guess to have been about 2,000 feet, and made a long, banking turn to the right over San Francisco Bay.
There was not a single person on the plane who was not aware something was wrong—terribly wrong. It could not have been more than three minutes before the captain announced over the public address system that we were about to do an emergency landing and that we should listen carefully to what the flight attendants had to say. While flying over the bay, we dumped most of our fuel and then made a slow banking turn for a final approach back to the airport. The landing was as smooth as one would have expected if all were well. The only disconcerting aspect was the fact that the airport-crash tenders (specialized fire trucks) were on hand to greet our plane as we came to a halt at the end of the runway.
It was remarkable to me that within two hours of our return to the gate, American Airlines supplied another aircraft so that we might yet again commence our flight to Montreal. Even more remarkable, approximately 50 percent of the passengers refused to embark on the new equipment, including the older women seated next to me.
My second flight scare was not as dramatic, but sill unsettling. I was completing a business trip in the winter of 1988 to Spain, visiting with the purchasing managers of ENSIDESA, Empresa Nacional Siderurgica Sociedad Anonima, the Spanish state-owned steel company. We had a contract to import iron ore on small capesize ships into Gijon, a port on the north coast of Spain. I was flying back to New York, out of Madrid, on a TWA Boeing 747. The seating in economy was 3-4-3, and I had three seats to myself on the left side of the plane. This was fortunate, because while I was in Gijon, I had bought an oil painting, which I was carrying on board with me—not something one would get away with today.
We took off from the Madrid airport and slowly climbed up to our cruising altitude. I was reading a book—something I have always done while flying—when about forty-five minutes into the flight, I noticed the plane seemed to be doing a very slow banking turn. I suspect most people on board might not have noticed, but it piqued my interest sufficiently that I put my book down and stared out the window. About an hour into the flight, the captain came on the PA system. In a very slow Texan drawl, he explained that the two right engines on the plane had unexpectedly shut down, but there was nothing to fear, as the Boeing 747 was designed to fly on two engines alone. Not exactly comforting when you think of the size of a 747!
So we completed a very large, slow turn and headed back to Madrid airport, where we landed uneventfully. It took less than a day to repair the problem, and twenty-four hours later, we were on the same plane headed back to New York. Unlike my experience in San Francisco, the plane was full the following day. The Spaniards, unlike the Americans, showed no fear!