Airplane Travails

Our plane was re-routed through Philadelphia–we had to switch planes instead of just going directly from Charlotte to London, which meant a 2+ hour delay getting here. When we were at the gate, we were told that a mechanical problem necessitated swapping planes, so we were going to fly to Philly before making the transatlantic jump. Um, *gulp*? The pilot came on as we boarded and said that our de-icing whatevers were broken and it would be a bigger deal over the ocean.

A few years ago, I was on a plane and it dropped precipitously for about 3 seconds during our ascent before righting itself…about 15 minutes later, the pilot came on and said “sorry about the little bump back there, the autopilot wouldn’t give us back control and we had to turn it off, which caused us to fall. Everything’s ok now, though.”

Airplane travails are at least somewhat ameliorated by images like this one: