JFK to Long Beach: Speaking of Road ‘Trips’…, by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

March 31, 2010 Whitney Farmer 0 Comments

A funny thing happened on the way back from my little sister’s Broadway debut in “Come Fly Away”. Transcript of a text message I sent at 8:06 EST from my JetBlue flight 217 JFK/Long Beach to people who care about me:

“So…we just got back to jfk. our plane was hit by birds. all ok except for the plane. and the birds…”

Being an airline pilot must be the worst job in the world. I would rather have drunk punks maul me or ambitious C students gunning for me than have to be responsible for a packed plane of Passover travelers with a full tank of fuel. Beautiful frightened brown eyes beneath yarmulkes are a disharmonic convergence. But I suppose that, as is said in Shabbat, the fear of heaven was upon us.

Take off was icky, even though I had a new keychain/talisman with my little sister’s picture on it. Oh, and Frank Sinatra’s, too. It’s been awhile since I drove a car in ice and snow, but there was a bump and grind and then that sluggish fishtailing that makes you take your foot off the throttle – not an option when you are actively trying to trump gravity with the higher hand of thermodynamics. We did get off the ground – otherwise you would still be waiting for this blog – but we couldn’t seem to get enough altitude.  Being from the land of Boeing, I know that Airbus planes sound differently, but this one sounded differently. It was working very hard.

Within a few minutes, the pilot came on the overhead and said, “So folks, we are going to return back to the airport. It looks like we might have…been hit by a bird…a flock of birds…maybe two large flocks of birds…yeah, that’s the ticket. Everything looks wonderful on my instruments, but we want to get soil beneath our feet as soon as possible just to make us happier…” Maybe I’m not remembering this exactly right.

After this, we flew back and forth very low over the ocean so that – in addition to dumping fuel – we could look for great white shark fins which is something I always do when I travel to the land of ‘JAWS’. I had two bites of a delicious turkey sandwich that I had squirreled away in my purse in case I had to swim a lot. I was sitting in the middle of the plane at a window and we were so low that I was concerned that the wingtip would catch on the top of the waves as we banked for final approach back to JFK. This concern was supplanted almost immediately when I saw that the airport runways were lit up better than Christmas with emergency response vehicles. It looked like a series of red flashing crosses, and the lights of Broadway paled in comparison. I was really hoping that I wouldn’t become famous in the next few minutes.

I smiled when I discovered the perfect antidote to a bad attitude. Petty life-sapping distractions and gloominess lost their zest for me. It’s not that God Himself pulled an, “I’ll give you something to cry about…” punk’d moment on me, but I asked with a calm but dedicated voice for us to “…mount up with wings as eagles…” and to let the angel of death pass over us. Hence the name ‘Passover’…

We landed with a grinding icky not-normal roar and were chased until we stopped by emergency response vehicles from all sides. We didn’t have to use slides or oxygen masks, but as we were towed into the gate, we were told that they were going to get a new plane for us. Yes please…

Five hours later, with a new flight crew and some unfortunate reports of binge eating/drinking circulating from the remaining passengers who had elected to not get a rental car a drive cross country, we boarded again on to what would be a boring flight. Yes please…

We arrived in Long Beach at about 2:30 in the morning. The first song that played on the radio in the car was “I Can See Clearly Now”. The last song that finished its last note as the car pulled up to the curb at home was “On Broadway”. THIS is what a great soundtrack will do for a movie…What a ride!

It turns out that whatever happened during takeoff caused the tail of the plane to hit the runway and sustain damage. Someone connected to the flight crew said that we may have lost one engine. This would account for the roaring grinding noises, altitude problems, and the sluggish navigation, particularly if the hydraulics were damaged.

There was an additional casualty of the flight besides the plane and the rumored birds. I texted the following at 8:33 pm EST after arrival in JFK’s new JetBlue T5 terminal:

“They had all the emergency vehicles out and closed down the runways…we dumped fuel over the ocean…and I left my sandwich on the plane…” And it wasn’t just any sandwich. It was a roast turkey from Junior’s on Flatbush in Brooklyn.

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=7355913

Quote of the Blog from a passenger on the flight who was looking into driving cross country. I asked if she was going to get a car or get back on the plane. She said, “I’m going to Dunkin’ Donuts”.

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Whitney runs a rock music club in L.A. She has an MBA and no one cares.