Adventures in Flight

You may have heard that those of us out here on the left coast had a bit of a rain shower last week. As it happened, the deluge that blanketed the Bay Area beginning in the early morning hours and extending all day worked its way south down the state by the evening hours. My usual Friday evening travels, unfortunately, tracked precisely the areas of the heaviest impact of the storm.

The daytime hours, such as they were, revealed a very intense, very wet storm with high winds that made for fascinating viewing from the comfort of our office windows. It was as dark at 9:30 in the morning as it had been at seven previous evening. Fortunately, unlike the San Francisco airport, the Oakland airport rarely suffers systematic weather delays. In fact, we boarded our flight on time, although a snafu with baggage handling caused us to push back from the gate unexpectedly late. Nevertheless, we got off the ground with a minimum of hassle. For one of the few times in my many flights over the past four months, the flight was only half full, so the accommodations were not uncomfortable. (And we had honey roasted peanuts! Two packs!)

As expected, and as we had been warned by the pilot, the flight was rough the entire way to Southern California. The flight was generally bumpy, with two major drops in elevation, the kind that will ram you into the overhead bin if you're not wearing your seatbelt. The bucking grew worse as we began our approach for landing, because the focal point of the storm had found its way to the San Fernando Valley, precisely where we were trying to land. Seeing nothing out the window but rain streaming by, as the plane bucked and slewed, the overwhelming sensation was of being in a car that was traveling down a rough road too fast. I could imagine myself saying "hey, slow down, pal.” As soon as those sorts of thoughts enter your head, you begin to really wish that the plane would slow down. Of course, you can't do that when you are 8000 feet in the air, so you somehow have to find a way to resign yourself to the fact that it's just going to be a bumpy and slightly scary ride to the ground.

The lower we got the more unstable our ride became. The most difficult part of landing under these kinds of circumstances is that it is impossible to see anything out the windows. The sensation of flying through a cloud knowing that you are intentionally headed toward the ground, when the sensation of speed is enhanced by the bumpyness of the ride, is not something that even a frequent flyer like me truly enjoys. Nevertheless, it was nearly over.

As we approached the airfield, in an act of whistling past the (aviation) graveyard, I allowed myself to daydream about what could happen if something went wrong with our landing. I cheerfully imagined my blog post about how I've done something none of you have: I've survived an airplane crash! I recalled a Southwest jet that had skidded off the same runway in a similarly torrential storm in March 2000. Back then, however, there was a gas station across the street just past the end of the runway. There also was not a special runaway airplane safety device installed at the end of the runway that has been installed since then and successfully used. I figured that in a worst-case scenario, we would take too long to slow down, hit the safety device (which would do nothing more than simply slow the airplane as if we had driven into sand), then we would all be celebrities on the evening news, and I could have a first hand, eyewitness blog account of the adventure. It was a morbid variation on my usual Walter Mitty fantasy, in which I successfully take over the controls of the aircraft from the mysteriously stricken crew and land the airplane to great acclaim, but it gave me something to think about other than my increasing sense of nausea.

There comes a point in every flight, as the pilot flairs the plane by pulling the nose up and cutting the engines just before touchdown, that everything becomes still. So it was for us last Friday. We finally dropped below the cloud just before the beginning of the runway. Still yawning and rolling a bit, we passed over the yard that houses dozens of yellow school buses, the road that passes just beyond the airfield, and finally caught sight of the little blue lights that outline the runway. Having concluded recently that I don't enjoy watching the landing from the very last row of airplane, I turned my gaze inward and waited for touchdown. As expected, the engines went nearly silent, the nose came up, and calm descended over the cabin that had been bouncing for the past hour.

It was calm.

It stayed calm.

Hold on. Calm is nice, but shouldn't we have been jolted by a heavy touchdown by now? In fact, shouldn't we have connected with the runway couple of seconds ago? The aircraft felt like someone descending a ladder who is feeling with his toes for the ground below the lowest wrong. Reaching, reaching...

... and not touching the ground. Uh oh.

Just as I was processing all of this information, and the sense of panic that I had managed to keep tamped down surged to the surface, the engines roared, the airplane pitched back, and we headed into the sky again. The pilot had executed a perfect aborted landing, which is a small comfort when you are a passenger in an airplane in a heavy rainstorm attempting to land at an airport in a congested urban area that has a very short runway. (Sometimes too much knowledge is a dangerous thing.) Because I was not looking out the window at the time, I do not know how far down the runway we were when we powered back up and pulled out. I'm glad of that. We were also back up into the clouds so fast that I did not have a chance to see how close we were to the various houses, businesses, and mountains that lie off the end of the runway and which are rarely under any flight path. Again, I'm glad of that. The other downside to an aborted landing is that you have to go through the same white knuckle ride all over again, this time with the knowledge that it is possible to fail to land.

The captain advised us that there had been a wind problem at the time we attempted to land. That seems reasonable, and it would not surprise me if they suddenly gust of wind caused the airplane to generate too much lift at exactly the wrong moment, preventing it from touching down. The captain sped us back to the end of the valley and then executed an extremely sharp turn over the beginning of the glide path back into the Burbank Airport. I put the odds on a very hard, very certain landing at nearly 1:1. However, thankfully, we executed what was actually a very normal touchdown, more smooth than many I've had there.

Statistically, given how many flights I've taken over the past four months, I suppose it is inevitable that I would experience a variety of unusual events. I've experienced a flyby before, but that one was in broad daylight at the San Jose Airport, which is much larger than the Burbank Airport. A missed landing at night, in a major rainstorm, and a small airport, after a stormy flight, is one that will leave one's legs weak for quite a while afterwards.

To add insult to injury, of course, it was raining cats and dogs at the airport. Burbank does not afford its customers the luxury of jet waves, so in the twenty second walk from the airplane door to the door of the terminal, I was thoroughly soaked by the rain. Not only did I look like someone who'd had a very bad night as I walked down the terminal, I felt like it, too.

Okay, time to catch my next flight!