Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking, if you look out the right side of the aircraft you'll see mount raineer.It's at this point that I start to heed the word of the girl sitting in the seat next to me. She's been on the phone with her father in detroit who says that "snow and ice storms" are forecast for the next day or so for the detroit/chicaco/whole eastern side of the nation area. I elect to spend the night here and see how things develop rather than stay in chicago.Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain again, unfortunately we've had a hydrolic failure and need to turn around and head back to seattle, we should be on the ground within a half hour.
Ladies and gentlemen, the "maintanance crew" (see image at right) are onboard now to diagnose the problem, it should be minor and we should be back under way in 10-15 minutes.
Ladies and gentlemen, it appears the repairs will take a few hours, we've begun arranging hotel rooms for those of you who will miss your connecting flights...
My luggage, however, will be enjoying the auto capitals attractions tonight since they were unable to remove it from the plane.
If it's a minor deal, what's with the flame resistant suit the guy's wearing? Just in case the whole thing goes up in flames, he'll be okay while the rest of you are barbequed? I think they should send the fire-guys in without fire protection if they aren't deplaning the passengers first. They'll be much more motivated to find the problem and fix it, because they'll have the same investment in a successful outcome that the passengers have: staying alive and off the burn unit.
There were actually two of them - you can barely make out the orange visor poking out of the right side of the galley - and it was a little odd seeing them come strolling down the aisle. When we landed I did see the huge green fire trucks outside the plane, but I've seen them before whenever we've had to make a less than ideal landing (weather usually) so it was initially no big deal. Still, as martin put it, that's probably as close to being in a plane crash as one can get without, you know, the whole death thing. So statisticly speaking I should be good to go for the rest of my life :)