I can make an Airplane joke in this post about JetBlue Flight 292 because everything turned out okay. The Dallas connection? Read on. From a Woodrow Wilson FBvian:
Yesterday during the emergency landing, MSNBC news called upon retired United Captain Al Haynes as an expert pilot to narrate and comment on the live landing. Capt. Haynes is the hero of United Flight 232, which he successfully guided without any hydraulics to a crash landing in Souix City, Iowa, back in July 1989. Capt. Haynes is a 1948 graduate of Woodrow Wilson High in Lakewood, where he was known as “Ackie.” Ever modest and prone to understatement, he downplayed his own heroics while praising the pilots of Flight 292, calling the landing outstanding and pointing out that the pilots stopped on the runway’s center line. As he was on the phone with MSNBC for nearly an hour, awaiting the landing, his cell phone rang and he put the MSNBC anchor off for a minute to see if the caller was his daughter, Laurie. This is typical of the unaffected Captain, who shrugs off the limelight and only reluctantly agreed to be inducted into the Woodrow Alumni Hall of Fame.
Captain Haynes has also been cited numerous times in calls for an end to mandatory retirement ages for pilots. He was almost eligible for Social Security at the time of his great deed.
P.S. Al Haynes is unrelated to Jerry Haynes, Mr. Peppermint. But Jerry is 1944 graduate of Woodrow!
