Great story - but - what happened next? Was the source of smoke found? Did you get to fly the next day?

It didn't flat spin into the Sea of Japan.

I was on an American Airbus 320 out of SJU and I think someone mistook the condensate pouring out of the air conditioner for smoke and screamed 'STOP!!! STOP!!! FIRE!!! FIRE!!!' as the takeoff roll started...

Yeah, we hit the side of the runway and within seconds crash rescue was there as if out of nowhere. We were escorted to a back gate and 'deplaned' and left to the machinations of the airline flight schedules in frantic attempts to get us home.

We went to IAD and then to DTW and had to rent a car to get to LAN. What a story... We got in near 5:30AM. Not bad considering I was joking that spending a few days in SJU for mental health reasons wasn't a bad idea. Just in case... We flew that last leg in a Beech 1900. I didn't care at that point. Just get me home...

Didn't he say in the first installment that the heat issue went away? Still, once having the problem, in a main (as I remember), wouldn't be pretty if it came back or flared up into smoke and fire.

...Janine Turner isn't the patron saint of aviators.

My first arrival in America was on a Pan Am 747 much like the one that blew up over Lockerbie. Someone had smelled smoke in the cockpit and we had an escort of fire trucks and other emergency vehicles at JFK.

We almost all spoke English, but the pilot didn't say anything about the smoke, so the cavalcade came as a big surprise. Similarly, though, it didn't become an inferno.

Talking of which, I look forward to your take on the Sudan airplane fire.

And on a different note, did you hear about the Polish aircrew who couldn't understand ATC commands on leaving London Heathrow, took a random tour around the skies above us and returned, almost selecting the wrong runway? I thought any pilot that flew internationally had to be ready for all eventualities in English.

...what happened to the group. Did it eventually wend it's way to Canada?

And, was this group of non-English speakers loaded on the plane like a group of unaccompanied minors by a Japanese/English speaker and was meant to be met in Canada by a Japanese/English speaker? Or, were they just traveling around, hoping to find their way?

What an excellent story! I just loved it. The image of the clueless passnegers, the atampede of emergency vehicles, the dashing bravado of the pilots plugged in to iffy muzak . Wow, what a good story and so very true in the description of the whole scene.

Patrick, I'm glad to see a writer who knows how to convey the fun of flying, even in these troubled times. Maybe I've been lucky in that I don't fly very much, but I've never had a bad experience flying. Maybe it's been because I take a zenlike attitude to the experience and don't get my panties in a knot over stuff no one can control.

My best flight was the last one. Returning from Des Moines Iowa to Texas after hurricane Rita, I flew an extremely tiny plane to Beaumont Texas from Houston with a plane load of returning refugees just like me and I was never so proud of the crew and all my neighbors on tha plane and waiting for us to land. We needed help to deplane the little critter, chunking our baggage onto the tarmac, avoiding gaping big holes in the tornup parking zone, and wrestling the three wheelchair bound passengers to the pavement.

There were waiting firemen, ambulances, sturdy guys of all description, people dragging and kicking luggage to the pickup area in 103 degree heat.

I never got the chance then, but to the pilots and crew of that plane, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

The Anne of Green Gables story is popular with Japanese people, I've always thought, because it is exactly the type of storyline repeated in the "Renzoku Terebi Shousetsu" (Continuing TV Drama) that are a popular feature of NHK (Japan's version of the BBC) programming.

While they might be described as "soap operas", they are pretty much squeaky clean stories that run daily for 6 months and are then followed by a new and different story. They all feature a young woman starting her path in life: much more emphasis on work life than on love life but there always is a love story.

The current one, Hitomi, is about a young woman who moves to Tokyo to become a hip-hop dancer and lives with an uncle-figure and the three foster children he is raising. Oh yes, she lives in a very beautiful and traditional area of Tokyo set between one of the most modern skyscrapery parts of Tokyo and the world-famous Tsukiji fish market (where Hitomi has a "day job"). The previous one was about a young woman who moved to Osaka to become a stand-up comic (well, in "rakugo" the comedian sits down and tells very very long "shaggy dog" type stories).

So, the Anne of Green Gables story fits exactly the mold and so is a bit of North American culture that is very easy for Japanese people to relate to.

Recently one of NHK's relatively advanced English study programs featured two Japanese women at the Anne site. The key English practice of each program was a reenacted bit from the story. I thought it was funny that the target audience (middle-aged Japanese women, I presumed) would be polishing their abilities to use the quite dated and almost archaic English featured in the Anne stories.

Hope this helps!

I too was puzzled about the Anne of Green Gables thing but was told by several people that it was one of the first English novels to be translated into Japanese. I had a friend who had a dream to learn English and at age 40 moved to PEI for 14 months and came back with fluent English. She picked that place out of all others because of Anne.