"Have you ever lost an engine?" is a query I'm sometimes hit with. The question is a mildly perplexing one, since the specter of a failed engine is often first on fliers' minds; yet, as I hope you're learning, it's generally not hazardous. Now you know the answer. Yes, once, sort of.

Or twice, if you choose to see it that way: In preparing this article I remembered something from a very long time ago. Winter 1982, to be precise, though being only a high school sophomore at the time, I'm speaking from a passenger's point of view. I was flying with my mother and grandmother from Seattle to Tokyo in a Northwest 747 -- or, as it was still then known, Northwest Orient -- when No. 2 fell victim to the proverbial "warning light," to quote the captain. Now you have some idea what those bromidic excuses might mean. Whatever was broken, it forced a diversion to Anchorage, causing us to miss a planned connection to Hong Kong.

Twenty years later, off it was to Bangor, causing us to miss a planned midnight beer at Conway's on Avenue de la Toison.

Though first came the matter of those 300,000 pounds, which were 50,000 too many for a legal landing.

Expelling all that gas would take the better part of half an hour. Back to another checklist and deployment of a dump chute, concealed behind a panel in the bottom of the wing. From the flight deck, there's no indication of the offload other than the lazily unwinding digits on the quantity gauges. There's nothing to see from the window, though it was hard not to imagine a certain caricature -- that of a hapless plane with a huge contrail of dollar bills furrowing behind it. (Small change for an airline, overall, and the spray would dissipate and evaporate long before reaching the ground, but the experience of dumping fuel, I learned, just feels wrong on every level.) At the bottom of the photograph you can see a series of odd black and white handles, which supervise the movement of fuel between eight main tanks. Trying to disgorge all that liquid, while at the same time keeping the tank quantities even, with a dead engine to boot, had me working those levers like a guy playing a pipe organ.

Thus our ecological and economic contributions to the state of Maine that spring morning became 7,500 gallons of jet fuel set loose high over Baxter State Park, and three extra bookings at the Bangor airport Hilton, where the breakfast buffet, we'd find out the following day, didn't hold a candle to the one at the namesake property in Brussels. We landed safely around 10 a.m. No emergency was declared; no phalanx of fire engines awaited us.

For the record, had our jet been a factory-fresh 747 or A340 instead of a Cold War hand-me-down, things would have unfolded more or less identically, although with the help of fancier gizmos and a little less multitasking. Better technology; same results.

Except, presume for a moment the plane had been loaded with 300 vacationers and not, as it happened, 18 oversize cargo pallets. Imagine the tension and nervous bustle as passengers assume the worst, sketching out wills on the backs of barf bags, sneaking cellphone calls to loved ones.

Up front, the crew isn't thinking about death. They're thinking about that lost buffet, the task of extra paperwork, and how, no matter how many public address announcements the captain makes, and how many reassurances he provides, people still won't believe it.

All in a morning's work.

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