Things that will get me off a plane very quickly...

[DFW]

38. Not de-icing almost killed me once

The day my younger daughter was born, I got a call to make an emergency trip to Brussels. I hired a private plane, so that I could get back to my wife and newborn daughter (and 2 year old elder daughter) ASAP. Her parents were there, too, so I didn't have to take the elder one with me to Belgium. In the time I was working, an ice storm came through Brussels, and the pilot had to abort the take-off for the flight back to Germany, because he couldn't get the plane off the ground before the runway ended, and said we'd only crash underway even if he had managed to get airborne. They closed Brussels airport due to the storm, so the pilot left the plane there, and we had to rent a car. The pilot and I took 8 hours to get back to Düsseldorf on what was normally a 2½ hour drive. No cell phones in those days, and most of the public phones along the way were out of order or had half mile lines. My wife thought she was a widow when she didn't hear from me for almost 10 hours, and no one from Brussels called her because they didn't know either.