Wednesday, January 11, 2006

I thought I was going to watch myself crash like the people on JetBlue

I went to Orlando a few weeks ago to visit my mom, see the water-ski show at Cypress Gardens, and add a new Hooters to my list (I am up to my 69th different Hooters location now; you can read the background of my Hooters obsession here).

It was on Song Airlines (which will be absorbed by Delta soon) and it was a pretty fun flight because they have more than a thousand MP3s to listen to, games to play with other passengers (I made it to the #3 all-time high-score on a trivia game), and live satellite TV. And before the flight got off the ground, rather than the usual boring "...in the event of a water landing..." and "...this is how you put on the oxygen mask..." stuff, the Flight Attendants entertained us with a Christmas-like version that started out as " 'Twas Eight Days Before Christmas..." and had all of the safety instructions worked into the story. It took a long time but it was an amusing change of pace.

On the flight back home to Boston, I noticed that we seemed to be circling the area more than normal. I happened to look over at the people next to me who were watching CNN and I saw the caption that looked like "BOSTON PLANE TROUBLE" and it looked like an aerial shot of Logan Airport.

I thought, "Hmm...I'm on a plane, and I am going to Boston, and I thought we were circling anyway...uhhh...maybe I should put on the TV and watch the news". It felt like it took an eternity to change the channel. I was trying my best to remain calm but all I could think of were those people on the infamous JetBlue flight where they watched the news on TV for like three hours while their jet burned off fuel in preparation for an emergency landing.

Once I finally got the news on my TV I saw that it wasn't my flight that was in trouble this time (it was a flight from Milwaukee that ended up landing safely). But for those few minutes until I changed the channel, it wasn't a very good feeling.