When I saw the plane make the emergency landing in the Hudson last week, I thought of my good friend and quizzo regular BMT (above, red sweater), who was involved in an extremely hairy crash landing a few years ago. I asked him to relate his harrowing tale to us. Here it is:
When I lived in Boston I used to fly back and forth to the Buffalo area every other week. Like many misguided people, I was attempting to maintain a long-distance relationship which is always pointless and doomed. On one such trip I was flying to Rochester, NY but not until a lightning storm kept me sitting at Logan airport for 5 hours.
I had never been real keen on flying—-I was a jumpy, nervous psychological weakling in flight—-and so it wasn’t so much a relief when I finally boarded the plane. Because I made this 1-hour flight so frequently, I had a routine where I’d whine internally for the first 35 minutes of the flight and then get up and go to the bathroom, somehow knowing that when I zipped-up we’d be making the descent. For some reason this made me feel better.
While completing my routine, the pilot came over the PA and mumbled something I couldn’t really understand. In my mind of course, he was telling us that the wings had fallen off and that we were uncontrollably hurtling towards Earth, though in reality he was probably telling everyone about the Sky Mall or the weather. But when I opened the bathroom door and saw the passengers looking at each other with panic, I knew my fantasies about falling out of the sky were finally coming true.
