San Francisco Airport

I received this scary photo yesterday from a close friend who is a very frequent business traveller.

He says that the haze looks like clouds but is actually smoke from all the wild fires in the San Francisco area. The pilot warned on landing that they would smell smoke in the cabin. My friend was glad he did. — at San Francisco International Airport.

I had a terrifying experience in a smokey cabin that you can read about it in "The Fun of Flying: The Pan Am Years."  Here's an excerpt from my book:

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"After 40 minutes in the air, we were well past the halfway point of no return, and I heard a loud popping noise.  Then I choked on fouled air and watched the right engine burst into flames.  My eyes burned from smoke that was somehow sucked into the cabin, I yelled “FUEGO (FIRE),” then everyone panicked, and instinctively, we unfastened our seat belts and scrambled to the other side of the plane. I could see quivering, fiery, elongated yellow tentacles stretching their way across the wing to the cabin, scratching at the windows, anxious to roast the well stuffed bird.

If you looked out of any window on either side of the plane all you could see was tangled, endless, impenetrable vegetation.  There were 8,500 square miles of lush, tropical rain forest beneath us.  It was the second largest jungle habitat in the Americas after the Amazon.  It was home to rare birds and reptiles of every sort. But it also was the urine marked territorial hunting ground for numerous carnivores, that all bared their underbellies to the baddest cat of them all, the man-eating, yellow and black spotted jaguar, the largest feline in the Western Hemisphere, even outweighing the North American mountain lion. The spotted jaguar epitomized ferocity, and was a perfect killing machine, invisible in any forest and worshipped by the ancient Maya and Aztec as one of the angriest of their gods.

 There was no place we could possibly make an emergency landing.  If the plane were going to go down, it could only crash into the tree tops, exploding them into meteoric showers of needle-like splinters, making fresh mince meat of trapped passengers for the ravenous kitties to munch."