B6292

Tonight on my way home from work, Dan Capils mentioned a cable news channel was showing a jet circling LAX in preparation for an emergency landing. Apparently I'm a well known aviation enthusiast among my friends (duh), because I received phone calls or text messages from three such wonderful friends who also were alerting me to this situation. After awhile I learned the aircraft in question was N536JB, an Airbus A320-232, operating as JetBlue (B6) flight 292. Hamm and I were scheduled to have Pho and Boba night, but we were too glued to the coverage of this potentially horrible situation unfolding on the cable news networks to get our butts moving. We stayed home long enough to see the pilot make an amazingly smooth landing despite the nose gear wearing down and burning off as the jet rolled down the runway. Both of us were overjoyed to see there were no further problems and all 140 passengers and 6 crew were all able to deplane down air stairs rather than jumping out of the emergency slides.

Fox News had pretty good coverage of this right up until the point when the a/c was vectored for their final approach by ATC. This just happened to coincide with the start of Hannity and Colmes. These guys drive me nuts, especially Sean. If you think he doesn't know anything about politics, you should have heard him try to talk about commercial aviation. With people like him spewing their "intellect" across the airwaves, its no wonder I'm inundated on a daily basis with dumbasses who think their regurgitated news commentator talking point is going to impress me. They all need to be put out of their misery. Anyway, CNN and the always avuncular Larry King had way better coverage by this time. Larry had Captian Al Haynes on the phone who was the pilot of UA232 that crashed in Souix City, Iowa enroute from DEN (Stapleton!) to ORD on July 19, 1989. Captain Haynes is credited with saving 185 of the 295 lives aboard by piloting the DC-10-10 without the control of most of his flight surfaces. I can't imagine being one these passengers knowing they may be dead in a matter of minutes. I'm sure many of the pax aboard B6292 felt the same today.

After we realized all was well with the troubled aircraft we headed for Pho. It was about 7:45 by this time so we wouldn't have made it to our usual Pho at Pho Hoang Hau (they close at 8) so we tried a new place, Pho Duy. I think we liked Pho Duy better...more people were eating there, the prices were cheaper, and the food seemed to be better. Oh yeah, and they're open past 8 pm.

Once we got to Boba, Hamm-Hikle Foosball Death Match 2005 was back on. I have been wiping the floor with Hamm the past few times we've played, but she came out strong this time. I think it was the three color jellies in the bottom of her hot tea. Her rally didn't last long, though. I came back with a vengance...so much so, in fact, the Foosball ball went flying off the table several times. I ended up winning again. We'll see what happens in the next round. I'll keep you posted.