I was visiting my parents in Tennessee when I got a last minute call requesting my immediate return to SF. My dad and I rushed to the airport, were we could see people boarding the plane. It was a brown Boeing 747 with a few missing windows and one of the emergency doors was missing. It looked unsafe, so my dad decided to come with me. We abandoned the car on the tarmac and boarded the plane without any luggage.
The plane started moving before we had even found our seats. It was a full flight and no-one else seemed concerned about the missing windows. The take off was smooth, and I started to relax, but after a few minutes in the air I looked out the window and saw that our plane was drastically losing altitude and swerving around unstably. At first I was the only one to notice how the terrible flying, but then other people started looking out the windows and all the passengers started panicking.
We were now flying right above the ground and nearly missing big buildings as we flew through some city. I made sure my buckle was fastened and braced for a crash, but it never came. A few minutes later my dad and I decide to take control of the plane and rescue everyone, so we storm the aisles and bang on the door to the pilots cabinet. No one answers so we tore the door of the hinge.
The flight cabinet had wall to wall shag carpeting. Red curtains hung in front of all the windows, tinting all the incoming sunlight red. There was a steward washing his hands in an elegant sink, he was face was covered with a mud mask and he had cucumber slices over his eyes. “Where is the captian?” I asked, adding “We have to save this flight.”
The steward pointed casually to the pilot, who was sitting in a nearby chair. He was facing the front of the plane, but had a curtain over his head, like the sort that old time photographers had when taking portraits of early pioneers. I touched his should and pulled his head out from under the sheet so I could see his face. The pilot, who turned out to be Ms. Jay (from America’s Next Top Model), said “Am I doing a bad job? Maybe you should fly this plane.”
I sat down at the pilot’s chair and prepared to fly. When I lifted up the red curtain, I expected to see a big window, but was surprised to find a wooden wall. Near the lower right hand corner was a tiny window, about 3 inches wide, that was the only way to see where I was flying. The plane jerked back and forth and I suddenly realized that Ms. Jay had done a much better job of flying than I was. I felt certain we were going to crash, but tried as best as I could to keep us up high and stable. Finally the plane seemed under control, and although I couldn’t see much, I felt that I finally understood the controls. A few minutes passed before my dad slide one of the big red curtains open that were on the sides of the cabinet and we could finally see out the sides of the plane. That’s when I realized that the reason the plane felt so stable was because I had accidentally landed the plain on a highway.
Since we were almost there, I decided to just keep piloting the 747 on the highway until we reached San Francisco.
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