But, in the dark of the mostly sleeping passenger cabin, there were three chimes, not two. That's what it took to shake me from my fog and know things were going to get serious.
The flight attendant reached for the cabin phone, spoke to the cockpit, and then immediately went to securing the galley. "Flight attendants prepare for landing," from Left Seat was not far behind.
I checked my watch, and it was about 8 AM, more than an hour before our scheduled arrival in DC. I turned to Robin and said "We're diverting. Now. Something's wrong."
The first class attendant got done scurrying about the galley, and came and stood in front of us. We were diverting and we would soon be landing at, "an airport."
She explained that she knew we were all experienced travelers and almost never did this, but this time we were to review the information cards in our seatbacks, paying particular attention to the crash positions and emergency evacuation. If anyone had any questions about how to do anything in those sections, she needed to know RIGHT NOW. Every single one of us pulled and read the card like we'd never seen one before.
Volunteers were taken to assist in ensuring that the doors were opened and available for egress should we have to evacuate. This was not a "verbal yes" sort of thing, but a "come with me now and I'm going to show you for real how to do this."
I've flown quite a lot in recent years. Not superhuman numbers, by any means, but I figure I've been on a plane 350 or more times in the last eight years. I've been actually diverted only twice. And, nobody has EVER seen it necessary to offer midflight explanations of crash positions, or actually begun to prepare to evacuate. It occurred to me this might be quite serious.
I began to use the still-operational inflight WiFi to send some quick messages to a short list of people that had to know:
"We are diverting. There's something wrong with our plane. I love you."
In retrospect, I can see that this would be a classic "last thing we ever heard from..." kind of message, and is, of course, quite macabre. But, it was short, direct, and accomplished the two things I found most important, faced with a nontrivial possibility that we would find ourselves suddenly at the end of the path: It told people that should know what happened to me, and it told those people that, in what might be final moments, I was thinking about them, and did, in fact, love them.
As I put the phone down, I heard the last of the instructions, "... you must leave everything that you have under the seat and in the overheads behind. We all have laptops that we are concerned about, but they WILL be left behind while we evacuate!"
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Captain. We have a fault, and we have run the checklists for it, and this is telling us to declare an emergency... we are above Greenville-Spartanburg and we are currently spiraling down toward the airport there. We'll be on the ground in ten minutes"
In my head, I couldn't help adding, "...one way or another."
"Your flight attendants should be instructing you on evacuation procedure, but we are fairly confident we won't need to evacuate." Fairly confident. Not sure. But fairly. Carefully chosen verbiage from the gentleman in the left seat. My mind reels back to the instructional, "in the unlikely event of a water landing..." What they don't tell you is that if you're going to hit the water, the unlikely part is that it will be a "landing."
Many of us up front on that flight were actually regular travel acquaintances (the New Orleans DC commuter loop is not a heavily used one, and you definitely get to know some folks). I knew six people out of the twelve seats in first. We all spent a lot of time casting nervous glances at each other, and there was a lot of hand holding, and quiet reassurances. There were prayers. A lot of prayers.
It's not a nice feeling being in an aircraft in distress, and descending into clouds toward the ground. We had begun, as the folks on the flight deck had said, a "spiral" toward the airport. (I get that this is to be descriptive of the maneuver, and is technically accurate to the motion, but holy shit, the wording did not inspire confidence!) This had the aircraft begin to bank slowly into a banked right turn, with that banking angle slowly increasing. As we descended in that way into the fog of the clouds, we were still increasing that angle, and I reached my very first moment of real visceral fear in my entire flying history.
Without visual cues nor instrumentation, and on a banked turn, the forces you feel do not correspond to what your actual orientation in space is. And this lead me to briefly think, "what if we're continuing that bank until we begin to roll over?" I gripped Robin's hand a lot harder than I intended. Weirdly, I giggled through that whole sense of disorientation.
As we broke through to the clear air below the clouds, I could see we were in no more radical an attitude than we were above, and this gave me a bit of relief.
One of the passengers I was next to had been a commercial pilot for an unnamed Atlanta-based airline for thirty years. I leaned over and asked what he thought of the situation. We decided that, since the plane didn't appear to be behaving strangely that we didn't think there was a catastrophic physical failure. But, he kept saying "it's very unusual." No physical damage? Excellent. "Very unusual?" Not so good. There was some speculation that this could be a security issue that was being announced to the cabin as an equipment issue.
By this time, we had started on a straight descending path toward the runway. As is common, our speed was decreased and increased along the way. This was good. We appeared to have control over and power from the engines. One more weasel in my head disappeared.
As we touched down, with what can only be described very positive contact, we whizzed past every fire truck, ambulance, and support vehicle that GSP had at their disposal. It occured to me, we had never heard the terrifying "Brace!" command. Unsurprisingly, the cabin erupted in applause.
We taxied to the jetway, and the "bong" indicating we could unbelt went off. This completely surprised our attendant, who was expecting a tarmac evacuation. Turns out, with the jetway pulled back, and strapped into the jump seat, she couldn't actually see we were parked at a gate.
And thus began the most strangely normal deplaning of my entire flight history. After a couple of quick trips to the bathroom, all of us that are "regulars," What I'm calling the Krewe of Airport Bars, descended immediately upon the nearest concourse watering hole, where I bought mimosas while we all rebooked flights.
After several announcements from the captain to the boarding area, and a couple of personal sidebars with him, what we found out was this. ExPilotGuy and I were completely wrong. There was no security issue. What happened was ("what ha'happen wuz...") that a circuit breaker on a line that provides power to the avionics unit had literally snapped off midflight. (Avionics. Right. We need that, no?) This left only one component backing it up. That redundant component is not like a spare tire on the ol' station wagon. You don't get to run around on it until it's convenient. It's required that you put in to the nearest capable airport and address the repair before the plane can be allowed to fly any further.
So no evacuation, completely rebooked. No harm, no foul. Up tip the mimosas.
So,did I die on that flight? No, I sure didn't. Did I think I was going to? Well, let's say that I don't know if I actually thought I WAS going to die, but I definitely didn't think I wasn't.
So, interesting Monday. Things are going to be a little weird for a while.
