The Floridian Adventures (TFA): A Feather in the Window

I found out about the Planktos opportunity (or challenge) in mid-March earlier this year. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity. Create the computer infrastructure for the Weatherbird II, travel the sea and see all these exotic places we were to travel to boot. Who wouldn’t turn it down, right?

So, at the beginning of April, I accepted Planktos’ invite.

Planktos bought my ticket on this initial interview. I would join the crew in Norfolk, Virginia and go through a five day trial run that would take us to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Now, when I fly, I’m a Southwest loyalist. In this particular case, I didn’t have a choice and thought nothing of it until I saw the ticket stub in my email inbox. AirTran Airlines was the carrier I would be flying and before this point, I had never heard of them.

Before I departed DFW, I told a friend of mine what carrier I was using. She looked at me with a crazed look and said, “What? Are you f*****’ crazy? They’re the Wal-Mart of the skies with the worst safety record possible.” (Note: To validate her point, I came to find out later that AirTran buys a majority of their airplanes used from the major carriers like American and Continental which translates into cheaper prices).

Cautious, but not deterred, I obviously took the flight anyway. This flight happened to stop over in Atlanta where I would board a connecting flight to Richmond, Virginia.

The flight from Dallas was unremarkable and round one was over when we landed in Atlanta. Round two of the trip however would be a completely different story.

After boarding the McDonald-Douglas MD-80 that would take myself and the other passengers to Richmond, it was obvious the plane was showing its age. Resolved, I found my window seat anyway, sat down and continued reading my Time magazine I bought in Dallas. When we started to push back from the gate, I put my magazine down, buckled up and turned to look out the window.

Now, when you look out an airplane window, you expect to see a wing, the tarmac or vehicles running around, hurrying to their destination. Well, not this window.

On most aircraft, the windows have two panes - an inner pane, and an outer pane with a void of air separating the two panes. In this particular void, there wasn’t just air. There was a whole, unblemished bird feather resting at the bottom of the window.

After staring in amazement, I began to ask myself how the hell a feather got there and what is wrong with this plane?

By this point in my stunned awe, we had already taken off and ascended into the clouds. Five minutes passed with me staring at the window when I was brought back to reality by the Captain coming on the PA system:

“Uhhhhhhh, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t want to alarm you, but the aircraft is doing some odd things. It just came out of maintenance last night and seems to be having some odd mechanical problems. Because of this, we’re going to turn back to Atlanta. We’ll give you updates when we get on the ground.”

And with that, the plane veered hard to the left, did a 180 and flew back to Atlanta.

When we got back to the airport, I found a nice little bar where I parked it and had some well deserved glasses of Scotch.

I eventually made it to Richmond, but I should have heeded that feathers warning. It was an omen of interesting things to come.

ER