Emergency landing

I was sleeping quite nicely on a plane heading to Las Vegas this morning when I started to get hot. The sun was coming straight through my window and onto my sweatshirt. (Remember, I've said it's essential to bring a sweatshirt and pair of socks on a plane because they're always cold.) Now, if we're traveling straight west and the sun rises in the east, it should have been behind me. I was starting to wonder if I should have paid more attention in geography class.

This is about the time the pilot came over the intercom and told us that there was a "maintenance problem" for which we would be making an emergency landing (I believe he called it an "unscheduled diversion") in Denver. That explained the sudden right turn. There, we were going to switch planes and continue to Vegas. We were a half-hour from landing in Denver, so I had about 30 minutes to think.

I started to wonder if we were on one of those planes where the landing gear had malfunctioned. Perhaps Chad was even watching our flight on TV, checking to see if we'd land ok. I could imagine the Breaking News alert that might be waiting for me in my email: "Flight to Vegas makes unscheduled landing in Denver: Watch Live on Fox." I looked out the window for TV helicopters filming us but none were whirling around.

Someone in my row asked the question we'd all been mulling: What, exactly, was wrong with the plane? The flight attendant hesitated and told us that the plane was losing fuel--or that perhaps the gauge had just malfunctioned. For some reason, this calmed me down. Hey, I figured, I've come close enough to running out of gas in my lifetime that I could give them a bit of a break on this one. (If I would have considered at the time that leaking fuel combined with sparks from the tires hitting the ground while landing could set the whole plane on fire, I may have been a bit more panicked.)

In my moment of calm, I realized that I could not bring my purse or backpack with me if we had a crash landing, so I made sure to put a few bucks, my driver's license, and my car keys (we only have one key for the Jeep and I did not want to deal with getting a new one) in the pocket of my jeans. And I was quite glad I was wearing my tennis shoes in the unlikely event I had to run for my life. Oh, and in my head I told pretty much everybody I loved them juuuust in case.

But the landing was fine. The plane was abandoned by all 200 or so of us and we walked halfway through the Denver airport, got on another plane, and made it to Vegas about two hours late. I did appreciate the humor of one of the flight attendants, who told us that the real reason we stopped was because the Denver airport has great burritos. If I would have known this ahead of time, I might have grabbed lunch.