There are some places that feel very unsafe. Like in a commercial airliner in the middle of one of the most powerful hurricanes Irma ever recorded “but it’s not that much different from flying through the Midwest in the summertime with thunderstorms,”
But that's where 173 Delta passengers, plus flight crew, found themselves Wednesday afternoon. Delta Flight 302, the last commercial airplane to fly out of San Juan before the airport shut down amid 185 mile-per-hour winds, rocketed out of Puerto Rico's San Juan Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in between bands of Category 5 Hurricane Irma. The flight safely made it to New York's JFK International Airport less than three and half hours later
Once the plane landed in San Juan, the alternative—leaving the plane on the tarmac or in a hangar—would probably have destroyed the airplane. “It’s awful hard to keep an airplane that big down to the ground permanently, so it doesn’t move and doesn’t move into other airplanes or into the terminal,” says Pete Field, a former Navy test pilot. “Even a Boeing 737 could be wrenched around.” If the plane had gotten stuck, Delta probably could have gotten the humans out safely. But it almost certainly would have lost a plane.
To get Delta Flight 302 into Puerto Rico and out again before Irma’s full force hit the airport, the airline had to carefully orchestrate a plan. The pilots are important here, but so is the ground personnel. Air traffic control had to stay on the scene, as did the fueling equipment and ground support staff.
