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Fears are flying Travelers' Log: Many Worries, Few AnswersBy Rick Horowitz
She heard something. I was deep into the Monday-morning papers, oblivious to my surroundings as the plane pushed back from the gate and rolled toward the runway, but she heard something. Heard it, and felt it -- a shimmy, a shiver where the thrust should be. "We're heading back," she said, and she was right. They had heard it, too. (So much for the convenience of the Albuquerque-to-Chicago nonstop.) Now the pilot's voice came over the intercom: They'd heard the shimmy-shiver from the cockpit, and one of the airport crew had heard it from the ground as the plane taxied by. It sounded like a problem with one of the engines, he told us; a compressor didn't seem to be working properly. They were returning to the gate to get it looked at, and they'd be calling the American Airlines maintenance center in Tulsa to decide how to proceed after that. It was the most detailed report we'd ever heard from a pilot, we agreed; most of the time, they just say it's something "mechanical." We were glad to have actual, specific information, and grateful that they were proceeding so cautiously. Fifteen minutes later, we knew why. We were back at the ticket counter, "deplaned" and hoping to rebook our trip, when we heard about another American Airlines flight: Flight 587, New York to Santo Domingo. "Mechanical? Or...behavioral?" we asked the somber ticket agent. Too soon to tell. "Casualties?" "Quite a few." So much for getting back to normal. Our new tickets in hand -- Albuquerque to Dallas, Dallas to Chicago -- we joined the crowd watching the TV monitors in the airport bar. There'd been a problem with one of the engines, eyewitnesses were saying. One of the engines had fallen off the plane. On this monitor, we saw flames and firemen. On that one, a White House spokesman knocking down rumors. On that one, a network anchor trying to make sense of it all. Again. Then it was time to leave, and we headed down the runway with both of us listening for the shimmy-shiver, and for anything else even slightly abnormal. Listening, and hoping that when we reached Dallas, the latest news would be...no latest news. One crash, we told ourselves, was an accident -- awful, but an accident. Two crashes would mean sabotage. When we reached Dallas, there was no word of a second crash, but there was no word of anything. The Albuquerque airport had had actual TVs, tuned to actual stations. Dallas had the CNN Airport Network, and the monitors were strangely blank. Were they trying to spare our feelings? Calm our nerves? It didn't work. Our eavesdropping turned up no evidence of a new wave of terrorism, so we boarded the plane to Chicago -- and she heard something again. As we pushed away from the gate, she heard a rattle. Not quite the same sound as the first time, she said, but a sound nonetheless. "Do you want to tell somebody?" I asked her. She decided to take her chances, and we took off, and the noise stopped, and we made it to Chicago without incident. Except for the emergency vehicles we saw racing this way and that as we touched down at O'Hare. Fire trucks rolling, their lights flashing, they were gathering at the end of a runway -- dealing with something, or waiting for something. But what? A plane is coming in with trouble, a gate agent told us. What kind of trouble? She didn't know. A plane from one of the smaller airlines has already landed, a pilot told us, and has trucks clustered all around it. Why? He didn't know. Nobody knew -- or nobody was saying. The CNN monitors were as blank in Chicago as they'd been in Dallas. On the all-news radio station on the drive home, nothing. In the Tuesday-morning paper, nothing. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they were just being cautious. We could hardly blame them. Normal is still miles away. Posted 11/13/01.
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Rick Horowitz
