Bad timing...

I guess I jinxed myself. How is it that I have had our most eventful day of flying commercially the day after I write about how safe air travel is? I guess that's what I get, huh?

We had a early show time this morning, having to be at the airport at 4:15am in Indiana, for a 5am flight. Get to the plane, get it started and all the pre-flight checks are perfect...seriously, no problems at all. We board the plane, do all of our stuff, and take the runway to take off. It is my leg to fly, so I advance the power and our #2 engine (the right one for all those not in the aviation world) decided to reach about 70% of the thrust is was supposed to reach. We accelerate, basically on one good engine, and reach 90 knots, which is just over 100mph, and still no response from the other engine. So we have to abort the takeoff, which is can be pretty scary for passengers who have no idea what is going on. We return to the gate and get everyone off, because this plane is not going anywhere until the mechanics come out and check out the bad engine.

We are at a fairly small airport at 5am in the morning...let me tell you that the mechanics able to work on our aircraft are asleep (where we all would have rather been) and it was almost 90 mins before he got there. He did all sorts of tests and inspections and could not find what was causing the problems. So we wait again --- this time for 3 mechanics to come from our hub in Chicago. The problem is, the next flight from Chicago doesn't land until just after 9am, which if you are keeping track is over 4 hours after we were already supposed to be gone. Finally the flight bringing in our mechanics lands and then it is their turn to play with the engine. After 2 hours of their tests, inspections, and guess work, we were no further.

Here comes the fun part. Since the engine has not been fixed, we are of course not going to take the 70 passengers that are waiting for this flight, as it is simply not safe. Anyone knows that an engine failure on an airplane is a bad thing, and although it did not fail totally, producing 30+% less thrust than it should is still not good. Mesa decides that it needs to get the plane back to Chicago though to have the engine taken off the plane and fixed. And how is the plane going to get to Chicago you ask? I can tell you that it is not by driving it. But rather it is legal for the crew to do what's called a "maintenance ferry flight" where the plane is flown back to a maintenance hub broken. Now, there are strict rules that the company and FAA have for these flights. For example, no passengers may be carried. In fact only the flight crew and mechanics can be on board. (WAIT WHAT?) That means that even though the plane is deemed UNSAFE for passenger transport, we will have the crew (and yes that is me) fly it back. My question is why is it okay for the crew to get killed and not the passengers?

Well, we flew the plane back. Very weird being on a plane that is normally packed full of people with only the Captain, me, the flight attendants, and three mechanics. Very different flying actually. Thankfully the flight time from Fort Wayne, IN to Chicago is less than 30 minutes, so we made it with thankfully no serious additional problems.

Thinking about it though, it does drive home how safe air travel is. We noticed the problem right away, and took care of it with no injuries to passengers. Now granted the passengers were not able to take that flight, but none the less, no one is injured. See, air travel really is safe!