Southwest 225: Heads Down! Stay Down!

Well, this past week I once again had the incredible fortune to narrowly avert disaster in an airplane.

I was on board Southwest 225 from Denver to Phoenix on Monday, June 3 when a front tire blew during takeoff, and took out a hydraulic system with it. We all heard the loud noise, and some passengers later reported seeing parts of the tire fly past them on the left side of the aircraft; but even in the pilot’s conversation with Air Traffic Control he was uncertain what had happened. The flight continued for perhaps 10 or 12 minutes with no announcements, although we did not seem to be gaining that much altitude. But then the flight attendants came out in the aisles and told us about the tire and the hydraulics, and that we were going to have to prepare for an emergency landing.

With great urgency, they went through in detail how to assume the tuck position to prepare for impact, and then how to evacuate through the windows. They made us take out and study our aircraft safety cards, but I found that my eyes were just glossing over it and I couldn’t focus on the pictures because I couldn’t quite believe this was really happening. The flight attendant made me snap back to reality. “We can do this,” one of them kept telling us. “I have 30 years of experience. She has 40. She has 20. We can do this.”

I was in an exit row aisle seat, and the flight attendant looked me right in the eyes when she explained my role to me: once the pilot called for an evacuation, assuming there was no fire on my side of the plane, I should stand on my seat and yell for the passengers to leave their bags behind and jump through the window onto the emergency slide, hands locked behind their necks. Don’t leave until everyone is evacuated, she told all of us in the exit row, “unless you get too scared.” She even found a moment to joke with us. “Guys, this is why you sat here. It wasn’t for the extra leg room.”

For a while, the pilot had difficulty controlling the aircraft and it began swinging around in a way I had never experienced before. Some people were crying. Some people were praying aloud. Some people were hugging the flight attendants – one of whom was now running down the aisle in her stocking feet because all women had been instructed to remove their high heels. It was at this point that I ignored instructions, turned on my phone, and texted Julie: “Emergency situation. Blown tire. Returning to Den. Love you!”

Through it all, the pilot was unflustered and reassuring. At one point he told us that although they had lost a hydraulic system, there were two on this aircraft; he also apologized in an almost blasé manner for the inconvenience. (As I learned later, this was also true in his communications with Air Traffic Control. Before declaring an emergency, he said in a voice that was about 33 degrees Fahrenheit, “We’ve got a little bit of a loss of hydraulic system.”) This man was well trained.

I had a few minutes to process it all. I had some practical thoughts. Remove my glasses, because the flight attendant had said that in a crash landing “that tray table won’t be your friend.” Shift an external hard drive from my bag to my pocket, since I knew that in an evacuation we would have to leave our bags behind and might never recover them. But there was also time for contemplation – and while I felt profoundly sad about what might be about to happen, and all the complications it would create for Julie and my family and even my students, I also felt remarkably calm. I guess a lifetime of adopting a fatalistic approach to just about everything had somehow steeled me for this ultimate crisis.

They announced when we were five minutes out, and by this time the pilot seemed to have steadied the aircraft. Then at the one-minute mark they yelled for us all to get into the crash position: “Heads down! Stay down! Heads down! Stay down!” And we had 60 seconds to stare at the floor and wonder whether this might be our last minute on earth.

But the pilot pulled off a relatively normal landing, albeit at an extreme angle and with an initial jolt. Firetrucks and EMTs awaited us on the runway. Under their watchful eyes, we were able to taxi most of the way back to the gate before being towed in.

Was it as dire as it seemed? I don’t know. Although those flight attendants said they had never experienced the loss of a tire and hydraulics, and later in the week another one told me he had never had to give the command to get into the crash position, I am also sure this was nothing they hadn’t been through on flight simulators many times. In all, we spent 29 minutes in the air – starting in Denver and ending in Denver, but having traveled a very long distance into our souls.

Later that night, I looked back at my boarding pass from 225 – which said both “This flight has departed” and “CANCELLED.” Which made me wonder: does the combination of the two equal “dearly departed”?