Air France Disaster

Over the years I have flown well over 100,000 miles all over North America, Europe and Asia and each time I boarded the plane there was a chance, as their always is, that an aviation mishap could occur. As much as everyone works very hard to make air travel failsafe people screw up, birds fly into engines and sometimes Mother Nature just takes things into her own hands. So when I hear of a catastrophe like this latest Air France alleged crash into the Atlantic I quietly thank God I made it through 35 years of winging my way across the world without a major problem. I can remember a few scary incidents where I held my breath and grabbed the armrest in a death grip such as the night I was flying into the Atlanta airport and we had to abort the landing at the last minute because a plane had not vacated our runway in time. It is a rather interesting ride as you are descending as if to land and then suddenly the pilot pulls back on the throttle and the plane levels out and starts shaking violently as it tries to regain altitude. After a few seconds, (seemed like minutes) the huge flying tube began to rise and then the pilot came on the intercom and explained what happened. Or the time we were taking off from Logan airport in Boston and as we left the runway (which by the way for those of you who don’t know the runway ends at the Pacific Ocean) and were ascending nicely the engines suddenly went silent. No announcement and not a sound from a cabin full of people wondering what the hell was going on? Then as if we willed it to happen the engines roared to life and we started to rise again. Not 10 seconds later the engines died again and I thought to myself, could this be the end of the road? Not 5 seconds went by and the engines were running full out. Then we resumed our flight upwards with no more pauses and it wasn’t until we reached flight altitude that the pilot explained. They had just installed a new device on the plane that could detect instantly if another aircraft was in an area that could result in a mid air collision. Once this device utters its warning the pilot automatically takes evasive actions which include slowing down and then speeding up again to change our trajectory upwards. Of course we were in the old reliable DC 9 which has very loud engines so to our ears the slowing down sounded like shutting down.
I used to tell my kids that I was one of the few fathers in Canada that took an airplane to work which actually was true. I was managing two plants at the time, one in Toronto and one in Green Bay Wisconsin. I would go to Green Bay via Detroit every other week and I sure got to know everyone at the airports in Green Bay, Toronto and Detroit by the time that assignment was over. Other than a few slippery landings in the snow there weren’t too many abnormalities during my years of commuting back and forth by air to GB. On another occasion one of my colleagues who worked in Greenville South Carolina happened to be in Toronto finishing a week of training and decided to take a later plane back to Greenville via Charlotte NC. The plane she would have been on crashed after taking off from Charlotte that afternoon and for no other reason than her last minute change of mind she would have went down with that aircraft. But in reality I never worried about it too much as it could drive you around a bend if you let it get to you. I adapted and when I think back on it I really enjoyed the air travel and the opportunities that it gave me to see the world. I only hope the folks on board the Air France Jet met their maker very quickly with little or no suffering. All my sympathies go out to the families and friends of these people.