How Not to Panic When Your Circling Plane Runs Low on Fuel

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  06.11.07 | 6:10 PM ET

imageThe air traffic control system computer glitch that caused thousands of airline delays on the East Coast Friday also slowed down World Hum columnist Rolf Potts. He was aboard an AirTran flight from Atlanta to New York City’s LaGuardia Airport when the pilot announced a 20-minute delay. It would be the first of many announcements that day, and nearly eight hours would pass before Potts arrived in New York. I dialed him up today and asked him for a few gory details.

World Hum: What happened after the first announcement?

We started flying in circles. Then the pilot kept coming back on saying, “Another 20 minutes.” Then he said we were running out of fuel so we were going to have to land in Baltimore. In this day and age, when you get these cryptic messages from your pilot, you get a little nervous.

So you landed in Baltimore?

imageWell, we were coming in for a landing in Baltimore and were about 10 feet off the ground when we pulled up again. That was a little freaky. We finally landed, which was nice. I thought we were going to refuel and take off again. But then they said we couldn’t land at LaGuardia. They found us a gate in Baltimore and we got off the plane. We wound up spending hours in Baltimore. At that point I thought maybe we’d be stuck overnight, so I began calling friends, but we eventually made it out.

How’d you pass the time?

When we started circling, I was reading Daniel Boorstin’s The Image. A lot of people on the plane were getting upset. This is the advantage of bringing a good slow-reading book on a flight. “The Image” is pretty good. It’s not a page turner, it’s dense. So it kept me occupied instead of stressed.

Reminds me of my recent conversation with Jeff Biggers, who told me he passed the nearly 10 hours he was stuck on the tarmac in Texas by reading a good novel about Burma.

It works. Practical applications for literature include forestalling panic on airplanes.

Related on World Hum:
* Travel Writer on Airport Stranding in Texas: ‘My Head Was in Burma’
* Federal Passengers’ Bill of Rights One Step Closer to Law
* JetBlue Unveils ‘Customer Bill of Rights’
* JetBlue Apologizes for Stranding Passenges on Planes at JFK

Photo by Aaron Gustafson via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

Tags: Air Travel, Life of a Travel Writer, News and Briefs


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