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Announcing the winner of the 'Green Travel' April Fool's Day contest

by Justin Glow (RSS feed) on Apr 7th 2008 at 10:40AM

If you think way back to last Tuesday, you'll remember that we posted a whole collection of wacky, made up stories for April Fool's Day. And then the following day we told you that among all of those fake stories was a real one. You tried to guess which article was real, and anyone who got it correct was eligible to win a copy of the new book, Green Travel.

Here were the stories to choose from. I've bolded the real one.

That's right! "Airline mistakenly carries passenger on outside of plane" was a true story. Kent found the article in the Anchorage Times, which dated way back to 1992. It's not online, but he took the time to transcribe it, and you can read it after the jump.

Congratulations to the six people who guessed correctly. We'll randomly pick four out of those six and send you an email letting you know you've won.

Thanks for playing!

Anchorage Times

May, 1992

MarkAir, known lately for low fares, gave Christopher Griffin a free ride May 22. On the outside the plane.

Griffin says an attempt to be a good Samaritan earned him a harrowing four-mile trip on a commuter plane's left stabilizer, one of the small wings on the tail of a MarkAir Express Cessna 207. MarkAir CEO Neil Bergt doesn't see it quite that way, but feels that Griffin, 26, and his lawyer are trying to ride a tale into some quick cash. The Federal Aviation Administration, starting today, will begin trying to divine just what the heck happened.

Griffin, mind you, is no wing walker. He works at the Big Creek Fish Co., a fish processing plant a few miles up the Bristol Bay coast from Egegik. A seasoned worker whose job includes maintenance, construction, errands, and anything else that comes up.

So when he heard the buzz of the Cessna 207 landing on the beach near the plant, he jumped in a pickup to get supplies. Probably bread or meat for the camp, he recalled thinking.

This is Griffin's version of what happened next:

He went out to help unload the single engine Cessna. Then he and the Mark air express pilot, a blonde six-footer with a mustache and glasses, loaded about a dozen boxes from the plane onto the flatbed of his truck. Griffin got in his truck and headed north toward the plant along the beach.

Moments later, he was startled to see the pilot trying to tell him something. He couldn't figure it out, so he pulled up to the airplane. The pilot, struggling now in the muddy sand, made a quick turn until the plane's nose was facing down wind. He was stuck. He handed Griffin another box he had forgotten to unload.

The pilot, who's named Griffin and his lawyer don't know and MarkAir isn't revealing, was frantic. Griffin offered help. The pilot showed him what he wanted done.

He had Griffin stand in front of the stabilizer, facing the rear of the plane, and push down on the mini-wing to try to see-saw the nose into the air and free the wheel.

"He said, 'take your hat off, it's going to get pretty windy,'" Griffin recalled. That turned out to be a major understatement.

The pilot jumped into the plane and started the propeller. The plane began to inch forward. Griffin, backing up, figured the pilot would stop eventually. Or at least yell when it was time to get out of the way. Nope.

The plane lurched ahead, catching Griffin in the abdomen and folding him around the stabilizer. A bewildered Griffin grabbed whatever he could find. He dragged in the sand, banging his knees to the bottom stabilizer.

"I thought, I'll just coast, he'll stop, the thought of him taking off, it never occurred to me he'd do that," Griffin said.

But the plane pulled down the beach at ever greater speed. Then Griffin watched helplessly as the plane slipped the surly bonds of Egegik. The pilot evidently was unaware he had a passenger, although nearby workers later it look like the plane was wobbling badly as it rose. They didn't spot the stowaway on the tail from their vantage point 100 yards away.

Griffin said the pilot told him later they were 200 feet off the ground at one point, going 120 Miles per hour. Bergt said the pilot, who is no longer with MarkAir, told his manager's he never left the ground or if he did the plane was just a few feet off the ground. Bergt acknowledged that if he were hanging on to a wing, "a few feet would seem like 200 feet to me."

Could a Cessna 207 fly with a 175-pound load on the back?

"I really don't know," Bergt said Monday. "Sounds like it would be a little tail heavy. But that's a damn good airplane, maybe he could do it."

Griffin got really scared when the plane began to bank to the left for a turn, fearing that if the angle became too steep he wouldn't be able to hang on. He considered letting go at one point, when the plane was over the water. But the water is shallow near the beach, and he thought better of it.

Then the plane leveled off and headed down. The pilot apparently had noticed Griffin. It was a bumpy landing on the beach, but Griffin held on with only a few bruises and a banged up knee. The flight lasted five minutes at most.

"Have a nice plane ride?" were the pilots first words, Griffin said. Then, "Why didn't you let go?"

"And I just said, 'why didn't you stop?'" Griffin said. He asked for a ride back to his truck, this time inside the plane. When I got back, the pilot 'asked me to keep it between him and me.' Then he flew away. Griffin said the pilot never asked if he was hurt.

Bruce Stanford, an Anchorage attorney who works on contract for the village of Pilot Point down the coast from Egegik, heard about the incident and called Griffin. The lawyer contacted MarkAir on Friday. The FAA learned of the episode from the airline the same day, Stanford said.

"This guy wrote me a letter demanding $25,000 or he would call the press," Bergt said Monday.

Actually, Stanford's letter doesn't mention the media, but it does threaten a lawsuit. Aside from the bruises and a sore knee, Stanford said his client is suffering emotional distress from the scare. And he said MarkAir negligently failed to report the event.

"I don't think it was that much of an incident," Burke said. "No one was hurt, the airplane was not damaged. I think the (pilot) probably tried to keep it quiet. That's not unlike a bush pilot. I was one myself for years and I know what the poor guy must be going through."

"But we don't appreciate that stuff and is not condoned."

Joette Storm, an Anchorage spokeswoman for the FAA, said the agency would begin interviewing those involved today. She wasn't sure if there is a time limit for reporting such an incident to the FAA, or just what regulation the pilot may have violated.

"This is a very unusual situation, to say the least," Storm said. "There's no safety provisions for a human being on the outside of an aircraft. If this were true, I don't think it would fall under our regulations."

Bergt, who is fighting financial problems in a variety of lawsuits involving considerably more than $25,000, isn't sweating too much over this latest travail.

"I've been in this business 36 years and that's the funniest thing I've ever heard, and the most preposterous," he said. "I'd like to meet this kid if he was dumb enough to hang on, and the pilot to."