Lipscomb professor on plane that skidded off runway in Nashville Tuesday
Kim Chaudoin | 615.966.6494 |
All Andy Borchers was trying to do was to get home following a conference in Texas Tuesday, Dec. 15.
He got home, but the final few minutes of his journey did not go as smoothly as expected.
Borchers, professor of management and academic chair of the Department of Management and Marketing in Lipscomb’s College of Business, was travelling home from an information systems conference he was attending in Dallas.
He and his wife, Becky, boarded a plane in Dallas Tuesday afternoon and flew to Houston for a short layover before embarking on the final leg of their journey home. They were on board Southwest Airlines Flight 31 that left Houston Hobby Airport heading for a 5:20 p.m. CST arrival at Nashville International Airport.
The Boeing 737 landed without any issue at its appointed time in Nashville, but as the plane was taxiing on the runway to make its way to the terminal, something unexpected happened.
“The landing seemed to be fairly normal to me,” Borcher recalls. “We were taxiing on the runway to get into our gate. All of the sudden it felt like we hit a bump and then a dip. It was obvious that something had gone wrong, but I didn’t know exactly what.”
Borchers says the Southwest flight attendants immediately told the 133 passengers aboard the aircraft to sit down and emergency lights came on.
“We were sitting in the exit row,” he says. “But, we didn’t end up having to open the door. They always talk to you before you take off on a flight about being willing to open the doors in the event of an emergency. You usually don’t expect to have to actually do that.”
Flight attendants opened another door and passengers evacuated the plane. Borchers says he quickly grabbed a backpack he had with him, but passengers had to leave their luggage onboard. Passengers gathered on the tarmac and were accounted for. They were then loaded up on busses that are normally used to transport travellers to their cars in the airport parking lot and taken to the terminal.
While on the tarmac, Borchers snapped a picture of the plane (above) that he says “pretty much told the story.” He tweeted the photo and posted it on his Facebook page. The picture was picked up by media outlets around the world including in the London Daily Mail. Click here to view the article and Borcher's photo.
“I never had a sense of anything life-threatening at all as this was happening,” says Borchers. “Two minutes earlier we were going 100 miles down the run way. So, it could have been much worse. This was just like driving a car off the side of the road.”
Although there were some minor injuries reported, Borchers says calm prevailed.
“ It was concerning, of course,” he says. “I fly a lot and I’ve never experienced anything like this. The people on the flight were fairly calm. The flight attendants knew just what to do and acted quickly. Afterwards one of the flight attendants was a little shaken up because she had responsibility for the safety and welfare of all of us. She told me that in her 20 years on the job nothing like this had ever happened.”
The plane remained on the tarmac until a Federal Aviation Administration team could get to the site and investigate the cause of the incident. Passengers could not remove luggage or carry-on items from the plane until the inspection was complete. It took about four hours for the Borchers to reclaim their items that were aboard the plane.
Borchers says this unusual experience won’t stop him from travelling by air any time soon.
“I’ll be on a plane again Saturday afternoon,” he says, “heading to Providence, Rhode Island, to visit family for the holidays.”
The incident is being investigated by the FAA.
-Photo provided by Andy Borchers