by Andrew Coln

Created on: June 07, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

I looked into my wife's eyes, kissed her, and told her I loved her. We never said goodbye.

Flight 401 left Orlando, Florida bound for Cancun, Mexico May 14, 1996, and I was one of 42 passengers on the Allegro Airlines flight. What should have been a two-hour flight from our trip to see old friends from college turned into a nightmare that lasted hours, and which nearly cost us our lives. Without going into painful technical details, let it suffice to say that everything that could have gone wrong on a flight, from mechanical failure, to navigational failures, to a crew that forgot how to speak English (I and my wife were the only two people who spoke Spanish) did go wrong. Quick thinking and a snap decision from Captain Ayala saved all of our lives, and we landed, if you can call smacking into the earth in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and going into a hard spin landing. Our emergency landing (the airlines refused to call it a crash, but a plane broken nearly in half for me qualifies as more than emergency) was enough to remind me of how fragile our little lives are.

Four hours later, we were asked to board another flight to Cancun. Now I can honestly say that until that day I was a habitual flyer. I flew for business and to see family in Florida every few months. For me flying was like taking a bus trip for a couple of hours. And now I sat in the bar at the tiny Tampico Regional Airport with a stiff drink in my hand, more than likely still in shock, terrified at the thought of having to board a jet, and from the same company no less! Several people on that flight took a bus to Cancun, and a few others hopped a trip back home on an approaching cruise ship a couple of days later. My wife, my eight month-old daughter Alexa, and myself boarded the return flight home to Cancun. And I was still terrified.

Our jet sat on the tarmac at the airport while the airlines took care of bureaucratic nonsense with the airport (the airport normally didn't have international traffic), and while it did, the pilot came out and sat in the same row as ourselves. He was a passenger on this flight home.

We got the entire story as to what went wrong, when it went wrong, and how he tried his best to handle it. He made some crucial decisions during that flight, and the most important one was to choose the regional landing strip over a water landing along the beach. The beach.

He told us that he pulled out every trick he had learned as a young pilot in the Mexican military, where flying around in a poorly maintained bucket of bolts was an everyday thing. He concentrated, he stayed alert, he prayed, but most importantly, he never lost hope. He didn't have a choice, he said. "I have a wife and a new baby daughter at home," he told us. I didn't have the luxury of being able to die with my family together like you. My reasons for living were in Cancun, at home, waiting for Papi to come home. And then I thought to myself how so many people on this flight had their reasons for living somewhere else. I had to get them home, too."

At that moment, my fear vanished into the dry air of Tampico, because I knew that at that moment our new pilot up front also had reasons to live waiting for him back home. Everyone did. And he was going to do everything in his ability to make sure he and his passengers got to see them. I wasn't the only one who wanted to live.

Learn more about this author, Andrew Coln.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.