Glad To Be Alive

It’s the night before I am scheduled to fly back to Western New York. I am sitting in a motel room in Las Vegas, Nevada after a wonderful sixteen days exploring the desert Southwest, organizing and packing my bags, feeling depressed; I always feel a little depressed at the end of a great adventure and it's no different this time. I decide to check the weather forecast for WNY; the National Weather Service is predicting high winds and snow as a nasty front moves through. Oh great.

I wake up early the next morning, return my rental vehicle, check my baggage and go to the gate. I check the monitor for my flight and it says simply ‘On Time’, but I see that the corresponding flight from Buffalo to Las Vegas has been delayed. This makes me a little uneasy.

We board and take off with no problems. After we’ve been in the air for about an hour, the pilot informs us that we have a tailwind and we should be landing in Buffalo about 30 minutes ahead of schedule. So far so good. As we approach Buffalo I see snow falling from the clouds in great shifting curtains. We descend into the clouds and the ride gets bumpy. Nothing but a wall of white now outside my window; this is uncomfortable for me because I am such a visual person. I marvel at how pilots are able to land planes precisely on a runway without being able to see; to me that seems akin to barreling down a road at night in heavy fog without headlights. I know that very sophisticated equipment aids in the navigation but if I were a pilot it would still drive me crazy not being able to see.

Now we’re rocking and rolling as winds buffet the plane. I’ve been in this type of situation before; once, as we were about to land in Denver, the plane was struck by lightning and simultaneously shoved down by wind sheer; the pilot had to quickly ascend to avoid us being smashed into the ground. He didn't attempt to land at the Denver airport again; instead we flew to Colorado Springs some 70 miles away.

Finally, we descend out of the clouds and I can see the ground below- it makes me feel better knowing that the pilot can too. But we are still being pushed around by the winds and I see the runway looks icy. We touch down pitching from side to side - one tire, two, then all three, we are on the runway but still unstable . If one of the wings hits the ground… I don’t even want to think about it. Very quickly we decelerate from hundreds of miles per hour to a crawl – we have landed safely. Everyone cheers and applauds the pilot.

I get home a few hours later and turn on the TV. The news people are in the midst of informing us that a plane has just crashed near Buffalo Airport– they don’t know the details yet. Immediately I think how easily that could have been me – my plane landed in similar conditions. Suddenly I am no longer depressed - I am feeling lucky just to be alive!

By now, most everyone has heard about the horrible crash of Continental flight 3407 just a few miles from Buffalo Airport. My heart goes out to all those who lost a loved one in this awful tragedy.