My father had the news on when I went to visit him a few weeks ago. Did you all hear about that Delta flight to NYC that slid off the runway, when it landed in the snow? This reminded me of a pair of passengers.
The later passenger was going home from a neighborhood bar. It came up that he was going to work tomorrow. I offered a guess at his profession, but was not correct - he was an airplane mechanic for Delta.
"Really? Let me tell you about this other passenger..."
A few months earlier I'd pulled up to a condo in a gated community. A woman came out of the house and said to take her to the airport. Then she said that this was her second trip to the airport in a cab that day, and that she hoped that she'd get on a plane to Hawaii that evening, as she only had 9 days to spend with her family there.
She'd gotten on that day's first Hawaiian Airlines plane to the Islands... But the pilots found something in their preflight checks. Hawaiian Air has a maintenance contract with Delta, and the mechanics came over. After a while they all got off the plane to wait in the terminal. The passengers were told that the part their plane needed was in Los Angeles, and to just wait.
My airplane-mechanic-passenger sighed and said, "yeah, THAT plane..."
