Worst Airplane Experience?

Last week's Alaska Airlines crash off the Southern California coast gave Angelenos a deadly reminder of the hazards of air travel. So the Business Journal asks:

What's the scariest incident you've had on a plane?

Sally Papacharalambous

CPA/Account Executive

RHI Management Resources

I was on this plane -- it was just a puddle-jumper, there were only about six people on board -- from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale. In the middle of the flight it dropped. It felt like free-fall for about five seconds. I guess it was just an air pocket, but the people who didn't have their seat belts on hit the top of the plane. This one girl got really bruised up; she plowed her head into the ceiling. I'm not flying those little planes anymore.

Peter N. Taffae

Vice President and Manager

Brown & Riding Insurance Services

I used to go to London about five times a year. One time I was on an old TWA L-l0 leaving Heathrow. So we take off, and about an hour into the flight there's a big bump. The plane dropped and smoke started coming out of one of the engines. I later found out it was a close call between going to Iceland or going back, but we went back to Heathrow. I had been at a meeting and was on a 24-hour turnaround, so I was angry and tired. Then I fell asleep in the Ambassador's Club and missed my second flight. It was like a domino effect; everything went wrong.

Christopher Wright

Owner

Christopher Wright Management

I was on a flight to Newark right before Christmas. We were about to push off from the gate when the captain gets on the horn and says that a passenger has changed his mind and wanted to deplane. Usually they leave the bags on when someone does that at the last minute. But in this case, the passenger was going to Frankfurt, where those mail bomb threats were coming from, so they decided they wanted his luggage off too. We were delayed only about 45 minutes, but people sitting near the guy's seat noticed that the flight crew hadn't really checked thoroughly to see if he left anything behind. So some passengers, including my wife, got pretty agitated, and the flight crew didn't handle it well. Then we were about to land, the plane started to move suddenly from side to side, again and again. People were just antsy -- terrorism was on everyone's minds because of Y2K, and we were flying into East Coast winter weather. At that point the plane was creepy quiet until we landed.

Robert Lind

Managing Partner

Berkshire Bridge

The very, very worst -- for my family if not for me -- was back in the '80s when that American DC-10 went down in Chicago. I used to fly regularly out of Chicago to LAX, on the way back from doing business in Buffalo. I was traveling that night, and if I had traveled the route I normally did I would have gone down. Luckily I reversed my route that time, but I hadn't left an itinerary with my wife for that trip. I actually landed in L.A. without knowing about the crash and called her to let her know I was home. She had been going crazy -- she thought I was on the flight that crashed.

Bob Breslin

Plant Operations Manager

Ivy Hill Packaging

I flew on an America West plane last year, an MD-80 flying from Chicago to Ontario airport. At about 35,000 feet the pilot says, "Flight attendants, take your seats." They didn't even have time to get to their seats before the plane nose-dived. Then it started thrusting in the air. The wings were shuddering side to side. It happened very quickly. The woman next to me was absolutely freaking out. The plane made an emergency landing in Des Moines, Iowa, at an airport next to an airbase. They had to fly an empty plane in from Ohio to get us home.

Alan Carsrud

Senior Lecturer

Anderson School at UCLA 

I was working for the State Department in India nine years ago, and I was flying in on a propeller-driven aircraft in the middle of a monsoon. The pilot couldn't get around it, he couldn't get under or over it, so he just decided to go through it. We were bouncing from the turbulence, baggage and babies were flying all over the place. They had served some sort of beet paste with lunch, and it was smeared all over the walls of the plane. The plane even got struck by lightning, which we didn't know until we got off and saw the holes in the wings. We were so disoriented that we didn't even know when we had landed. When we got off the pilot was off the plane and he started kissing the ground. I told the State Department that I wasn't going to fly back to Calcutta in anything less than a Boeing 737.