OAKLAND, Calif. — The Southwest Airlines flight attendants putting on reindeer antlers and passing out pretzels and peanuts to distract the passengers from the possibility of a crash landing Wednesday weren’t enough to calm Ashley Stasio.
The jolt, sparks and grinding noise passengers experienced after taking off from Oakland airport on one of the busiest holiday flying days of the year had her expecting the worst. And the pilot’s announcement that there was trouble with the landing gear confirmed it.
“Landing gear issues? That’s bad,” said Stasio, 34, an account executive at a San Francisco tech company. “I thought I was going to die.”
But for the next four hours, as the Boeing 737 pilot circled above California’s Central Valley to burn off fuel, the frustration of holiday travel balanced out with a deep sigh of relief when the plane landed safely in Oakland — just where it took off.
Not all the passengers on Southwest Flight 2547 were so traumatized. Each of the 139 passengers and crew brought their own personality to the drama. Jeffrey Atkins thanked the flight crew for a safe landing, tweeting that “the best emergencies are the uneventful and boring ones.”
Just after the plane took off from Oakland International at 6 a.m., bound for Chicago, the passengers heard a loud, strange metal-on-metal grinding noise as the landing gear attempted to retract. Sparks flew outside the window. The plane jolted. The pilot’s voice crackled through the cabin.
There was a problem, he said. They were heading back to Oakland.
At first, rumors circulated that storms in Chicago were to blame for a return to Oakland, nothing more. But when the pilot came out of the cockpit to tell the passengers that they had to unload fuel to make an emergency landing, the atmosphere changed quickly.
Passengers started to panic, Stasio said. No one was screaming, but fear and tears filled the fuselage.
“I’m a little scared of flying as it is,” Stasio said.
Sitting in the window seat on the other side of her was Stephanie Sult, 28, also from San Francisco. In her black-checked wool scarf framing her blond hair, she was ready to visit her family in the Chicago area. She tried to lose herself in the second “Serial” podcast on her headset to block out dark thoughts.
But like most of the passengers, she was quickly sending strings of text messages to her boyfriend. He texted her back, sending her photos of their new Cavalier King Charles puppy named Charlie to make her feel better.
Stasio, however, grappled with whether to call her mother.
“I don’t want her to panic for four hours,” Stasio said. “I couldn’t do it to her.”
So she thought about her own life: “If this is it, have I fulfilled everything I wanted to do?”
She composed a text to her parents, telling them how much they meant to her, how much she loved them, but didn’t send it. She preferred to “roll the dice and say I’m going to be OK.”
Stasio is usually the one who needs comforting, but she stepped into a new role as comforter when the woman sitting in the aisle seat next to her looked her in the eyes and said, “We’re NOT going to be OK.”
“I’m an anxious person but I thought I’d be calm for her,” Stasio said.
Sult, in the window seat, did the same.
Stasio and Sult talked to each other about their families, their fears.
Just after 10 a.m., the pilot flew the plane low past the air traffic controllers to confirm the landing gear was in its proper place.
The flight attendants told the passengers to prepare for an emergency landing. The woman in the aisle seat cried. Stasio and Sult, who had just met four hours earlier, closed their eyes and held hands tightly.
And finally, the plane touched down. Softly.
Cheers and applause rumbled through the cabin as fire crews and police waited on the runway
“We were all crying,” Stasio said.
Southwest Airlines, with one of the best safety records in the industry, offered new flights for everyone. Stasio and Sult decided to wait a day, giving them time to decompress from their ordeal. They said goodbye to each other, but bonded by their frantic ordeal, they exchanged phone numbers.
Stasio didn’t even consider getting on another plane Wednesday, like most of the other passengers did, to complete her holiday journey to Pittsburgh.
As Stasio and Sult descended the escalator toward baggage claim, they were greeted by throngs of reporters and camera crews.
“I’m going home,” Stasio told reporters, “and having a cocktail.”
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