June, 1985. I was scheduled to fly from San Francisco to Portland for a meeting. The company booked me on Air California because United pilots were on strike when the ticket was booked.
I get to the airport early because United was just cranking up again after the strike, and they had a flight an hour earlier and I wanted the miles on United. I went to the counter, asked the agent if they could accept the ticket, and he gleefully says "Seat would go empty otherwise!". The airlines back then could get the revenue from the carrier it was booked on as long as they participated in an industry group.
Get on the plane. Pilot making the announcements says if we want to listed to the air traffic control chatter, tune in to channel 5. Being the transportation geek that I am, I tune in. Taxi out to the runway.
I'd flown out of SFO enough to know that we should be taking off about at the point where the runways cross, especially with the light load we had of maybe 20 passengers.
We start the takeoff roll. Halfway to the intersection of the runways, the channel changes over to music. That's odd, I thought. We don't exactly charge out of there, we were well past the junction before we took off. Cross the bay, hang a left over Oakland to head north.
A moment later, the plane starts turning left towards the west. Huh? The pilot comes on and says we lost half the air conditioning, and they're taking it back to SFO because that is United's maintenance base (which is true).
Flight attendant comes down the aisle. I wave her over and ask if I could somehow grab my ticket when we get back so I could run over to Air Cal and catch the flight I was originally supposed to.
She says to me "Look, you can do whatever you want when we get back. Let's get this plane down on the ground first. I haven't been too sure about these planes since the strike. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
It felt in my chest like I had a heart attack at that moment. I was wondering what was going on. We weren't going out over the ocean to dump fuel, plane was probably light enough to head straight back. Made the leg south, turned back and headed north.
This was shortly after a Japan Airlines flight crashed where the passengers had a pretty good idea they were in trouble for a while, some of them wrote out notes to their spouses. I wondered if I should do so. And if we were in real trouble, wouldn't they be instructing us the "kiss your ass goodbye" brace position?
As we made the approach over the San Mateo bridge, I concluded everything was probably going to turn out okay. We come to the end of the runway, but there are no other planes around either on the runway we were landing on or the takeoff runways, but all the fire trucks were there waiting to chase us down the runway.
Everything turned out fine, we pull up to the gate, and there were maintenance personnel standing by. As soon as we stopped and chocked, they popped open the engine cowling.
That's when I realized when the pilot said "air conditioners" that's code for the big honking air conditioners hanging under the wing, commonly referred to as engines.
We were all shuffled down to another gate where they had another plane for us to take. I walked alongside the captain, and asked "Flameout on the takeoff?" he said "Yeah".
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