Inga's Emergency Landing
If you look real close (squint and get close to the screen), you can see Inga sitting in a window of this plane, sipping a glass of champagne and waving to the camera. Really, Inga is sitting in the plane in this photo (though without the champagne).
Inga just got back from a business trip to Salt Lake City. On her way to SLC, a child on the flight was having difficulty breathing so they had to make an emergency landing in North Platte, Nebraska. The North Platte Regional Airport (the first lighted air field in the U.S!), usually only handles a few turboprop flights a day to Denver, but apparently the runway was designed to handle planes as large as a 747 for emergencies such as this. A television news crew was waiting along with the ambulance and took the above picture (as well as posting a story on their website and probably showing the tape on the evening news). The airport did not have any staff available to get the luggage of the sick child's family off the plane, so a passenger volunteered and climbed into the luggage hold to retrieve their bags. An hour and a half later, after refueling and filing a new flight plan, they were back on their way.
Inga wanted to pass along that she thought the American Airlines crew did a great job and was very impressed with how they handled the emergency. There was no word from the flight crew or from the news report on how the child was doing.
Technorati Tags: Emergency Landing, American Airlines, North Platte, North Platte Regional Airport
