Free A Chick in the Cockpit by Erika Armstrong Page A

instant before I was going to say V1, we all felt and heard an enormous “CABOOM!” I immediately yelled “Abort!” and put my hands over his on the throttles. My copilot didn’t need me to say anything, as he’d already come back on the throttles while trying to brake and slow down an incredibly heavy and fast moving aircraft. Since a Boeing is capable of most anything, we got it stopped in plenty of time and immediately shutdown the #2 engine after verifying it was the source of the abnormality. We then told tower we had a mechanical issue and needed to taxi back to the terminal.
    Turns out, we had shed a fan blade on one of the high compression turbine fans in the #2 (center) engine. The piece that broke off was only the size of a finger, but for the passengers sitting in the back of the airplane, they’re lucky that engineers had invented a shroud to contain shrapnel should this unlikely scenario ever happen. It was like containing a bomb.
    Since our company didn’t have a bunch of airplanes just lying around, they estimated an eight-hour delay before they could get another aircraft down to rescue our passengers in Mexico. Crew scheduling decided to just get us to a hotel and start crew rest, so we could fly the rescue airplane and our passengers back to Denver.
    I sweltered in my sweater, but I refused to take off the sweater until we got to the hotel because I was adamant about downplaying how pregnant I was. My crew was thrilled that we’d been put in an all-inclusive luxury resort, since it was the only vacancy nearby. We relaxed and waited for the rescue airplane, while most of our passenger were in “position and hold” at the airport.
    The rescue aircraft finally arrived—later than expected—and as my crew and I came on board, the station manager pulled me aside. He mentioned that we “had a slight problem” with this aircraft. I raised an eyebrow as he told me there had been a bomb threat associated with this airplane.
    Since my Spanish was limited and his English was broken, I asked again what he’d said. He verified there was a bomb threat. “A bomb threat?! Are you sure? Are you sure it was a bomb threat?” He looked me gravely in the eye and said, “Yes, a bomb threat.”
    I went into overdrive. “Okay, Jesus! Get all the aircraft groomers and my crew off this airplane now. Tell the baggage handler to stop loading bags and get the damn fuel truck far away from here. Have security pull all the passengers away from this side of the terminal and then tell me what the heck is going on! And why the hell are you letting everyone on this airplane if you’ve had a bomb threat?!” The station manager shrugged and said he’d never had one before and wasn’t sure what to do.
    I quietly walked past the passengers in the terminal and pulled a security officer aside and explained our situation. Within minutes, the Mexican security forces had shown up in their Jeeps, fully armed with automatic weapons and attitude. Of course, since Murphy’s Law rules, it was Sunday night and I couldn’t get hold of anyone at my company. Everyone at our company knew to not answer their phones on their time off. There were only a couple of crew schedulers at the office, and they couldn’t get hold of any of our operations people, either. We didn’t have an international cell phone, so I had to borrow the one and only phone that everyone in the office used. And at that, I’d had to call collect.
    Once everyone was away from the aircraft except the armed security team that was going through every inch of the airplane, I went down to the station manager’s office, carrying my seven months of pregnancy and the weight of being pissed off at the entire scene. I got as many people who could translate for us into the office and started trying to sort this out. I asked for a detailed sequence of how this information came to the