The Embraer 145 was known by a number of
cute (or insulting, depending on your perspective) nicknames. These include "Jungle Jet" given that the plane is built in Brazil, the "lawn dart"which accounts for her, ahem, sleek design, the EMB-98 plane, because you spend more time rebooting the computers rather than flying it, as well as my personal favorite"Barbie Jet". I adored it when people would derisively call it the Barbie Jet while I was in command. I'd usually shoot back a sassy, California-girl accented "well, yeah, and who else would you expect to be flying it than Barbie herself." I often got complete, stunned radio silence after that comment (and a raised eyebrow or two from my co-pilot). It's typically not women at the commands of airplanes (even in this day and age), so the Barbie Jet comment is usually directed toward men.One day, we had the flaps MEL'd, which basically means that we weren't allowed to use all the flaps for landing. (There are various items on an airplane that can be out of service for a certain period of time but the plane is still allowed to fly. If your item is not on the Master Equipment List, you can still fly with the item out of commission. Flaps are one of those items, surprisingly enough. Engines, they are not.) The plane flies just fine with less than the maximum flap input, but it flies much faster that way. You have to be fast on your feet, and fast on the brakes, when you land with the flaps MEL'd.
We had an uneventful flight take off from Montreal, and were heading back into Newark. The airplane has an EGPWS, basically a fancy word for the plane's ground detection system, used to prevent you from unintentionally flying into the ground ("controlled flight into terrain"). When we started to get close to the ground on landing, the EGPWS started "complaining" to us that the flaps were not fully extended. We could not turn this warning off, so other planes on our frequency as well as the air traffic controlers could hear the plane complaining "Too Low, Flaps". We did get a few comments about it, but for the most part, no one was concerned, as far as we knew.
The plane prattled on "Too low, Flaps, Too Low, Flaps" for about three minutes, starting about two miles from the runway and continued until we landed. When we finally opened the cockpit door after a satisfying landing, we stared in the face of the most frightened flight attendant we had ever seen. After the passengers had disembarked, she said that she thought we were all going to die. When I asked what the reason was that she was so scared, she replied "the plane, it kept announcing the whole way to landing 'Too Low, We're Going to Crash'". I nearly burst out laughing. Because she was sitting adjacent to the cockpit, she could hear vaguely what was going on in there, but it was muffled. So the simple "Too Low, Flaps" morphed into something much more sinister. I explained that the plane will never give up on you. It won't throw its hands in the air and proclaim imminent crashing. If the plane were in fact in crash territory, it would spend the remaining minutes it had attempting to remedy the situation.
It is a cute anecdote, but an ultimately solemn reminder that airplanes are serious pieces of equipment, with seriously important lives on board.
