Transition
Listening to: Thievery Corporation - Mirror Conspiracy
I’m operating in sort of a strange space today. I’ve spent the week working in Milwaukee, and I usually fly home to Seattle on Friday night. However, due to tight scheduling and some unfinished tasks, I stayed over Friday night and am departing at noon on Saturday. It’s upset my programming a bit. I usually check in, check luggage (I am congenitally incapable of travelling light), do my striptease for the delight of the TSA crew at security checkin, then head for the Northwest Airlines Worldclub for a glass of wine and some internet play before boarding my plane.
Today, however, the Worldclub closed at 11am, so I’m huddled with the great unwashed in the seating area around the gate, no wine, no internet access, no Friday night frisson. The Worldclub is one of several such facilities that each airline sponsors Anyone can join, you don’t have to be a frequent flyer, but there is a substantial annual fee that tiers down according to your frequent flyer rank. As an employee, I would probably not have the juice to cajole my employer into fronting the membership, but since I have my own corporation, and I’m the only employee, the cost controls are, shall we say, idiosynchratic and tend to unfairly favor the president.
Later…
On takeoff from Milwaukee, I saw lettering on the roof of a house under the flightpath that said, “May you fly with an angel on each wing.” (an incongruous well-wishing after living through the last few years of rancor between SeaTac airport and the surrounding communities). Though I don’t have a religious bone in my body, the sighting is still an odd coincidence, considering the events of the next hour.
Flying from Milwaukee to Seattle necessitates a connection in Minneapolis or, less frequently, Detroit. Of the two, Detroit usually offers the more problematic weather, ensconsed as it is on a peninsula between 3 Great Lakes. However, today the rough weather enveloped Minneapolis, and as we descended, the ride got a little bumpy - nothing unusual, really - but as we approached the runway, it felt like the pilots could not get the plane oriented properly, and we veered left, then right, then left again, with the nose pointed resolutely down, instead of the floating, nose-up attitude they usually assume just before touchdown. I became disturbed a bit by the seeming lack of control, as the plane was a DC-9, a clone of the MD-80 whose busted tailflap jackscrew doomed Alaska Flight 261. But then, I reasoned, the Alaska problem was the result of criminal neglect and deceit by the airline in its maintenance function, and not necessarily a design flaw in the plane.
Just then, the plane’s nose pointed up, the engines powered up and the pilots aborted the landing, no more than 10 feet from touching down. The climb out was not at all convincing either, gaining altitude only grudgingly and making sweeping turns this way and that. This only reinforced my feeling that the plane was experiencing mechanical problems. Additionally, there was only ominous silence from the cockpit, no reassuring, avuncular voice reducing the situation to policies and procedures.
Because of general cloudiness, I could not determine which direction we were headed, but I guessed northwest and away from the airport. Then I felt the landing gear come down again and the plane descend, and I was sure we were landing at an outlying airport, almost certainly dooming my Seattle connection any time soon, presuming that we landed safely in the first place. One more turn, and suddenly I recognized instead the southern approach to the Minneapolis airport, and regained my confidence in the whole process of air travel. Still, I was very attentive to all the details of approach and (finally) touchdown.
As we braked to a stop and the flight attendant got up to hand out jackets, I asked him, to nervous but general laughter in my area, if we’d be getting extra mileage credit for the flight.
