31C

On Thursday, sitting in an aisle seat next to an empty seat next to a pleasantly silent young Irish woman following a successful trip to Dublin, life seemed relatively fine; then the pilot came on to tell us that we had to turn back because of something or other so after a half an hour in the air Continental flight CO127 turned back to Dublin rather than, as he put it, “run the risk of running into problems over the Atlantic.”

As we began our descent the plane was rattling, pitching, shuffling, straining, yawing, and generally doing all those things that I don’t personally want a plane to do when I’m in it. The young woman began praying, someone puked a few rows behind me, a guy was being consoled by his very hot redhead girlfriend, some guy said, “Whoa!, I began to notice that the view through the window past the praying young woman was switching from grass to sky with all-too-much rapidity, then the pilot pulled out of the landing.

Someone said, “Shit,” or else that was me in my brain.

I offered a reassuring little smile to the girl, she smiled back, then went back to praying. I talked a little with the man across the aisle from me, a musician; he was headed for Long Island to sing some Irish ballads to a dinner crowd. The Irish Sea looked unusually choppy; then the co-pilot came on to say that there was a problem landing because of wind, but that we would now try the other runway. I assume the co-pilot spoke because the pilot was curled in a fetal ball sobbing gently in the furthest corner of the cockpit from the controls.

We began our second descent in a surprisingly quiet cabin, some retching behind me again, the redhead trying to calm down the boyfriend, a whole hell of a lot of praying…I suppose it’s hard to make noise when you’re praying. The descent seemed normal, than we were back to “generally doing all those things that I don’t personally want a plane to do when I’m in it.” This time the tires touched the tarmac, which would have been fine if they’d stayed there, but instead whichever of the pilots lost the toss pulled us up again.

I was, perhaps, too calm, too sanguine about this whole thing because they never asked us to get into “crash position,” but in retrospect they’ve probably figured that that’s a bit like going under a school desk if there’s a nuclear explosion. And, anyway, it might cause panic among the weaker passengers.

I thought, “Is there where they do the foamy-stuff landing?” I remember thinking that this would be a good thing, but this might have been because foam sounded a lot better than landing in the decidedly non-placid Irish Sea.

As we began our third descent, it occurred to me that Dublin Airport only has two runways. I said to the praying woman, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to die in a plane crash, I’ve always thought I’d have one of those ironic deaths: “He was on the way to join a gym…” She smiled a little, but God looked better to her than cheap gallows humor. The monitor on the seat-back in front of me registered our flight path as a yellow line which now looked like the work of a particularly un-artistic four-year-old.

We touched down to only scattered applause, perhaps because like me most people assume that stopping is the hard bit – well, it usually is in the movies. I heard someone mention pursuing emergency trucks. We seemed to be going pretty fast (as opposed to “fairly fast”), but we eventually stopped.

For about an hour, we waited on the tarmac to get off the plane so that I could have a cigarette and a vodka and tonic. I overheard the hot redhead tell someone on the other end of the line, “Tommy was a rock!” Note to self: fall in love again! The woman who was praying told me she was a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics – who knew mathematicians were even allowed to pray? After two subsequent nights in a hotel in Dublin airport, some chores and a few drinks with friends last night, I am finally feeling at home again.

I think I shall always sit in seat 31C.

Anyone interested in a more technical account of the incident can find details at http://avherald.com/h?article=428d2c90&opt=0