Passenger jet with broken landing gear makes safe landing

Radios out, jets scrambled to intercept it

MILWAUKEE, Wisc. (RWN) - An Air Islam 977 passenger jet with a broken landing gear and broken radios landed safely in Milwaukee after the pilot put a sign in the window that told fighters sent to intercept the plane that the 977's radios were broken.

Air Islam Flight 2120 was en route to Seattle from Paris when an electrical fire beneath the cockpit damaged the landing gear and, unbeknownst to the crew, the radios.

"The crew's first impulse was, rightly, to save the plane and the 1,000 passengers on it," said David McKissack, a spokesman for the Islamic States Aviation Administration. "In doing that, they made a radical turn off of their flight path. It was almost a wrenching turn to the left, out of Canadian airspace and right on a flight path for New Detroit.

"Controllers couldn't get a hold of the plane's crew, and standard-operating procedure after the Seattle incident requires us to scramble fighters for a possible intercept."

When the two F-22 Rapier fighters reached the airliner, the pilot hurried to make up a sign that said "Radios out, landing gear damaged, making emergency landing at Milwaukee."

One of the F-22s slid under the passenger jet and visually inspected the landing gear.

"It looked like the entire bay door had just been blown off," said Capt. Jack "Jihad" Ahami, the F-22 pilot. "I could see the strut and it was all bent. The fuselage around the door was all blackened from smoke and fire."

Initial speculation was that a bomb had gone off, but an inspection on the ground found the cause was most likely a short in one of the plane's electronics vaults. The plane landed on a foam-covered runway in Milwaukee.

"I don't know what was scarier, seeing those fighters or that landing," said Aziz al-Hari, a Parisian businessman flying to complete a business deal in Seattle. "I was sitting on the third deck, enjoying my drink when all of a sudden these planes came screaming by. I almost spilled my drink. The landing was fine, but waiting for it to happen was excruciating."

The practice of fighters being sent up when a plane falls out of communication was established nearly 20 years ago after members of a Brazilian end times cult hijacked another 977 and tried to fly it into the Capitol building in Seattle. The hijackers were poorly trained and had used an outdated version of Microsoft Flight Simulator to practice for the mission and flew the plane into Puget Sound instead, killing everyone aboard.

The plane's tail section still rises out of the bay, and the aircraft carrier Osama bin Laden is on permanent patrol off of Seattle to provide air defense.


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