Free A Chick in the Cockpit by Erika Armstrong Page B

station manager. With the help of several of us trying to translate, he explained that a passenger on another aircraft had mentioned that the rescue airplane would never make it to Mexico. Okay, well, that’s different than a bomb threat! He said the passenger who’d said it just got through customs and was waiting for a hotel bus. I ran (well, waddled really fast) out to where passengers were getting on hotel buses and started trying to locate this woman who’d been identified as making the “threat.” I literally stepped in front of a bus that was about to depart and got on and asked if this women was onboard. I must’ve been quite a sight, pissed off, pregnant, and sweating profusely in my sweater.
    The woman was, indeed, onboard. I pulled her off and asked what the heck was going on. She said all she did was tell one of our passengers, who had been waiting for about fourteen hours in the airport, that she doubted they’d get out of there today. Our passenger had been sitting at the bar during this exchange and it appeared that she had been extending her vacation alcohol as long as possible. Now I was even angrier because the station manager had completely blown this thing out of proportion and the wheels were already in motion to treat this like a bomb threat.
    To add insult to injury, I had to wait in the security line, again, and realized that the security line wasn’t moving because our “bomb threat” had shut it down. I walked to the front of the line and explained that I was the captain on the airplane that was having an “issue” and that I had to get back in to talk to the station manager. They wondered why I was outside the front of the airport and they could simply not believe that this crazy pregnant woman was the captain (even though I had all my security and identity tags on and my four bar epaulets on my shoulders) so I had to wait for the station manager to come and get me and escort me through security.
    I explained to the station manager that telling anyone that there was a “bomb threat,” when there wasn’t, was illegal. He just said he didn’t understand. It took another three hours to get the aircraft cleared from the Mexican authorities and to finally get our “safety officer” back in Minnesota to release the aircraft back into service. All the while, our passengers had been waiting in position and hold for hours. No one had told them what was going on, and even though they’d been there for fifteen hours, they didn’t want to leave for fear of missing their flight.
    When I got back to Minnesota, I wrote up a report explaining, in detail, what happened and how the communication with my company completely failed us. In the days after 9/11, our company had touted our new head of security as being the best in the industry, but when we had a chance to show how our system would work, the reality was laughable. So while I’d been hoping for a “Rotate,” we ended up staying on the ground.
    Meanwhile, my cleared for takeoff report went sailing into the chief pilot’s circular file.

8 Final Items
    1. This is the last checklist you’ll perform on the ground
    2. You are committed to what lies ahead
    3. Check the windsock
    4. Look all the way down the runway and visualize your flight path
    5. You are going to get very busy
    Upon clearance to take the active runway, the Final Item checklist is performed. It is a reminder and verification of those important items that have to wait until you are cleared for takeoff. For the Boeing 727, one of the items on this checklist is to turn on the remaining position lights. In busy traffic areas, being visible to other aircraft is of vital importance, and the Boeing could announce itself to others with a dazzling display of lights. The secondary and more subtle purpose of the Final Items Checklist is just a polite way of the manufacturer verifying with the crew that their