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Tuesday, February 21, 2006Airplane Stories #5: Winter Landing in DetroitOne Christmas in the late 1990's, if not 2000, I was flying into Detroit Metro Airport from Boston. We got to Detroit to find a snow storm going on. We circled a couple times before the pilot came on the intercom and said, "Well, visibility's about a mile down there, but we're a low visibility plane so we're going to go ahead and try and land."It wasn't the low visibility that bothered me. It was the "try." We're going to go ahead and try and land? I would have been completely fine if he hadn't said "try and land." He told us we'd be on the ground in about fifteen minutes. The plane started descending. I checked my watch, and watched out the window. We went into the clouds. I kept watching. Fifteen minutes later we were still in the clouds. I remember thinking that if we were going to be on the ground shortly we had better start descending again. A minute or two later we broke through the clouds, and - I kid you not - there were cars only 100-200 feet below us. It was a freeway, I-94 I believe. I was most definitely surprised, and then worried. The cars were life size! (As in, not like when you look down from a plane and normally the cars look like those micro-machine toys.) And they were whizzing by beneath us. I didn't have time to reach scared, for suddenly a runway appeared beneath us. It turns out one of the Metro Detroit airport runways runs right up to one of the freeways surrounding the airport. In all my years flying, I never knew that! |
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