Bulls get lucky after engines backfire
by Chris Strauss, USA TODAY Sports
Former Chicago Bulls center and current radio analyst Bill Wennington relayed a scary story from a recent team flight earlier this week on ESPN 1000′s “Waddle & Silvy” radio show.
Via ESPNChicago.com:
“Apparently a compressor in engine No. 3 had some trouble, and it sounded like it exploded, but I guess it’s like a jet engine backfire, which is very loud,” Wennington said. “Sparks fly out of it. It happened actually right after … the captain thrusts the engines forward and it revs up and starts to go, about three seconds after that you hear a ‘Boom!’ ‘Oh, what was that, are we stopping?’ The plane keeps going down [the runway] and you’re thinking, ‘Oh no, why aren’t we stopping?’
“It was funny, because we’re in the back of the plane, and the engines are right by us, and we hear it. They can’t hear it [in the front of the plane]. And apparently they couldn’t feel anything. And so we take off fine, and about five minutes later, two more booms, ‘Boom!, Boom!,’ and a couple people saw flames and sparks and stuff flying out [while looking out of] the window. We’re all thinking, ‘Well, it’s been nice.’”
The flight to Indianapolis Saturday night returned to O’Hare without further incident, but was out of commission for the time being, forcing the team to borrow the Blackhawks’ charter the next morning and then utilize the generosity of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban for their trip to San Antonio Monday night and return flight several nights later.
Bulls forward Louis Amundson tweeted about the experience, including a photo of the foreign logo inside the cabin.
As scary as the initial flight probably was, luckily it all ended without anything more than some frayed nerves and repairs to the team plane, proving George Costanza wrong again.
… [For more on Chicago Bulls get lucky after engines backfire on team flight, click here.]
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