“Chant this out loud with me:
BRACE. BRACE. HEAD DOWN. STAY DOWN.
BRACE. BRACE. HEAD DOWN. STAY DOWN.
BRACE. BRACE. HEAD DOWN. STAY DOWN.
BRACE. BRACE. HEAD DOWN. STAY DOWN.
Repeat until the words begin running together. Repeat until anxiety speeds up the chant into about three or four total syllables, taking only a couple of seconds to say.
Two years or so ago, as a flight my wife and I were on approached the airport to land, we could hear some strange grinding and high-pitched whirring going on beneath the plane. Very repetitive grinding and whirring. Not a good sound for any mechanical device to make. But whatever. That sort of thing happens. No big deal, right?
The grinding and whirring finally stopped, but our aircraft had made its way away from the airport and seemed to be circling. An announcement came over the P.A. system, and the pilot informed us that we had no functional landing gear. He thought. But they couldn’t be sure, because the computer system responsible for reporting on the landing gear was not working. And we had all heard that weird grinding and whirring. He also said something about the tower having an inability to visually determine whether our landing gear was up or down, due to low clouds and so forth. Moreover, the landing gear might be down, but it might not be locked into position. Or it just might be stuck halfway. There was no way of knowing.
BUT, the pilot assured us, these passenger jets are designed to be able to land on their bellies with only some jostling and sliding. No big whoop. The plane would be out of commission for a while, but we’d all be fine. As long as everyone was buckled in, all the loose baggage and objects in the cabin were secured, and everyone braced properly, we should hopefully all be fine.
So that’s what we set out to do. Land without landing gear. Maybe. On the belly of the plane. Maybe.
The flight attendants wanted us all to put our heads as low in our laps as they could go, with our arms bracing our heads, and chant with them: ‘BRACE. BRACE. HEAD DOWN. STAY DOWN.’
So we chanted. And braced. And at one point, I unbraced for a moment to look out the window and see a lineup of fire trucks and ambulances, lights flashing, just off the runway. Dozens of them, all waiting for our disaster to play out. A surreal vision.
The flight attendants began the chant stoically and authoritatively, but as we got closer, their voices began cracking and speeding up and slurring.
It was a bit exciting. And mostly terrifying. We would finally get/have to use those emergency doors and inflatable slides they always talk about in the safety brochures and demonstrations. Hopefully, we wouldn’t have a fire or smoke to contend with. No explosions. No random debris dislodging and flying across the cabin. Hopefully, people in the emergency rows knew what they were doing. Do I grab my backpack despite instructions not to? There are important work files on my computer, and the exit row is only two rows away.
So we descended into the airport space, bracing and chanting and praying. And I was mentally preparing for the evacuation. Visualizing how things would go.
Down we went. Down. Down.
We descended to our doom.
And landed without incident. Completely without incident.
It was the softest landing I’ve ever felt. It was like our plane was a down feather from a duckling being dropped gently onto an enormous marshmallow from about an inch away.
The landing gear was just fine. The computer just had malfunctioned. The grinding and whirring we heard: apparently irrelevant. Everyone burst into a spontaneous round of cheers and hoots and whoops and sighs and applause.
A totally normal flight in just about every way. We ended up only about 10 or 15 minutes late, and everything was completely fine in the end, yet that chant will forever be seared into my memory. The stress of that sort of moment cannot be un-experienced.
Indeed, sometimes in stressful situations, I’ll just blurt out ‘BRACE. BRACE. HEAD DOWN! STAY DOWN’ and sort of laugh to myself. It’s a way of telling myself and/or my wife that everything will be just fine. Which it usually is.”
