This week I am in Florida for work attending a class. Yep, about 2 miles from the beach and I am in class all day. Bummer. Being in Florida hasn't brought too much to talk about; the flight on the other hand...that was quite the adventure.
We (me and four other people from work that I traveled with) boarded the plane in Phoenix for an 8:50 am take-off. The plane took off, but didn't climb to altitude. We had just started circling the Phoenix area when the pilot came over the intercom. (Note - all of the quotes are going to be my best recollection of what was said).
"There is an error message with the door to the landing gear. We are going to open the landing gear and close it, which should take care of the error. In the meantime, we need to circle Phoenix because we can't continue with the error."
Okay, no problem. It got loud as the landing gear opened and closed. We continued circling. The landing gear opened once again, with the wing extensions open (that's the official term I'm sure).
Pilot on intercom again. "The message is still showing. We are in communication with the mechanics on the ground to see if we can fix the error. In the meantime we will continue circling. However, with all this circling we no longer have enough fuel to get us to Ft. Lauderdale so we'll have to return to the airport at some point."
In a few more minutes. "We are going to have to land so they can look on the error on the ground. It is nothing that can endanger the aircraft, but we need to fix it for the most safe flight. We need to circle for a while longer to burn off more fuel before we land."
About 20 minutes later. "We are getting ready to land. Right now the landing gear is locked. All indications show the wheels are down, however we want to make sure since it is locked. We are going to first do a fly by of the airport. We will fly low to the ground crew can make sure the wheels are down. Then, if everything is fine, we will come back around to land. Again, we think it is out but we want double check for safety. Also, when we do land, there are going to be emergency vehicles on the runway. This is just a precautionary measure."
Until this point it was kind of humorous, but now we are getting the seriousness of the situation. Emergency vehicles = pretty serious...right? The pilots were being very good about calmly giving us as much information as we needed so everyone on the plane was staying calm. We did still kind of joke because it eliminated any tension that could surface.
We circled around and came in for the fly by. From my window seat I watched as we got closer and closer to the ground. Near the runway we went down low...really low. People who couldn't see out the windows thought we were actually going to land. Really we just flew over the runway, <100 feet above the ground I think. Then we went up again.
After a few minutes the pilot again, "Everything looks good with the landing gear so we are going to circle back around and land. With the landing gear locked we can not manually steer the plane, so when we land we will sit on the runway until a tow comes to get us." Pause, pause, pause. "Oh, and remember that there will be emergency vehicles on the ground...as a precautionary measure".
Hmm, we didn't know about the lack of steering before. Interesting. But, people on the plane were still joking. Had the wheels not been down the atmosphere would have turned to scared and panicky quickly, but luckily that wasn't the case. I don't know what they do if the wheels don't come down; I can however imagine that it would be a bumpy landing probably filled with skidding, tipping, turning, breaking, burning, screaming and other not good things.
We finally landed. The emergency vehicles were there...right on the side of the runway...lights blaring...about 7 or 8 of them. We thankfully didn't need them. We sat on the runway. We were towed to a terminal. We de-boarded the plane. We sat in the airport for 1.5 hours. We boarded a different plane and had an non eventful flight to Florida, 4.5 hours late but in one piece and not complaining.
