After more than 40 years flying on planes, with over 950 flights under my belt, I finally had my first emergency landing! It was on an American Eagle Embraer E175 (registration N236NN), operated by Envoy Air, flying from Dallas Ft Worth (DFW) to Moline, IL (MLI).
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| Before departure |
After takeoff, the plane sounded quieter than normal and I noticed we have stopped climbing. And our altitude was still quite low. I connected to WiFi to pull up Flightradar24 and noticed that not only we were still below 10,000 feet, we had already made an unusual circuit.
At that point, I knew something was wrong. There were no announcements from the pilots for many minutes. Finally, captain announced they saw an indication on takeoff. Going through the checklist requires them to return to the airport.
At that point, I thought we would just point back to DFW and land. But, no, we kept on circling. Then I realized we probably had to burn up fuel before landing.
I expected captain to say something about that, but…
Next announcement was “we would be making a ‘normal landing’ and a ‘normal taxi’ back to the same gate in about 15 minutes.”
I thought this meant ‘not an emergency landing’? Or ‘don’t have to assume brace position during landing’?
Everyone went about their conversation and played on their phone as normal. Meanwhile, I kept a very close watch on FR24 as we continued to circle.
15 minutes went by and captain now announced we had to burn about 2000 pounds of fuel to make our landing weight, so it will be another 15 minutes before we make a ‘normal landing’ with a ‘normal taxi to bring us safely back to the gate’.
Doesn’t that sound suspicious calming, but not really? Flight attendant told everyone to stay seated with seatbelt on.
The circling seeming to go on forever without an end. I was happy there was free WiFi so I could keep an eye on FR24. Otherwise I would have been really anxious given the sparse information from the cockpit.
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| aa app showing diversion |
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| FR24 now shows divert |
Finally, captain said we were now going to make our approach for landing.
With all that emphasis on ‘normal’ (my seatmate thought unusual as well), I figured it was worth watching out for emergency vehicles alongside the runway.
Sure enough, there they were! A couple vehicles were on the approach end and there was a lot of them near the area where we slowed down.
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| Not a runway greeting you want to see |
I said outloud, “I think that’s for us”. Others noticed the same and realized how not-normal our situation was.
After we exited the runway, we stopped for around one minute before continuing taxi. I was on the left side so I didn’t see what was happening on the opposite side. I assume someone was visually inspecting the right engine.
A couple emergency and ops vehicles followed us to the gate.
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| Following to the gate |
After arrival, captain gave everyone a full explanation of what happened. We encountered an over pressure on the right engine on takeoff so he had to shut that engine down. We flew on one engine and made a single engine landing.
A couple people in the back of the plane applauded, the lady in front of me complained under her breath that captain did not give a full explanation during the flight, while I thanked the captain upon exiting.
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| Full flight |
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| Our broken plane back at the gate at DFW |
We all hurried to the new gate with the replacement aircraft. The same crew was flying the replacement airplane back out and they had to do paperwork on the broken plane before coming over, so boarding went slower than advertised.
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| “Maintenance Issue” |
Crew apologized for the lengthy delay and joked by adding “again” to most announcements. Drinks we were on the house due to the delay!
We arrived at Moline 2 hours and 40 minutes late. Given it’s a 90 minutes flight, we basically flew the same flight twice.
