City Holds Its Collective Breath

For a few hours, the city watched and waited and watched some more as the JetBlue aircraft seemed to circle endlessly in the sky, preparing to land somehow, somewhere.

With nonstop television coverage from shortly after 3 p.m. until the moment the plane touched down and safely stopped, people in gyms and bars, restaurants and offices gathered around TV sets -- turning the real-life drama into a surreal TV movie, a collective cross-town moment of fascination and anxiety.

At Grunions Sports Bar in Manhattan Beach, a good number of the 40 TV sets were tuned to the JetBlue plane coverage. Other TVs were still playing sports games, but the volume went down on those and up on the sets showing the plane.

“Everybody was pretty much enthralled by the scene,” said Michael McLaughlin, one of the bar’s owners.

Forty or 50 gathered, some in their seats, some standing by the screens in the bar. Quietly they watched as the plane approached, finally touching down. When flames shot out from the wheel, patrons offered advice out loud: “ ‘OK, OK, come on, you got it’ -- they were coaxing it down,” explained McLaughlin.

When the plane came to a stop, the bar erupted into cheers and applause.

“Someone in the bar said it was like a butterfly with sore feet,” said McLaughlin. “It’s an old golf term. If you hit a golf shot and land it on the green and it stops pretty quick, you’ll say it came down like a butterfly with sore feet.”

Christina Martinez, assistant manager of the Encounter Restaurant and Bar at Los Angeles International Airport, said that the restaurant first became aware of the problem about 4 p.m., when she received a phone call from a family member telling her that a plane was in trouble.

Soon, customers gathered around the bar, eyes glued to the television. Some prayed. A few were in tears. Some of the onlookers, strangers when they entered the restaurant, began talking to one another as if they were longtime friends.

“They were trying to reassure each other that everything was going to be fine,” Martinez said.

Martinez said she tried not to get caught up in the worry because she was responsible for the restaurant. If the plane ended up crashing, she might have had to evacuate. She was mainly concerned about keeping control of the crowd, she said.

There were about 20 or 30 people around the bar, watching TV, and 30 or so gathered at the restaurant’s north window, when the plane came into view.

“It seemed like it was just outside the window when it touched down, and we could see the smoke from the moment it hit, and then flames,” she said. “When we realized everything was going to be fine, everyone was cheering.”

Kevin Sharkey, production manager at Painless Productions, was at the company’s production offices in Culver City. “We saw the start of the ordeal, and we had to go out and shoot something, but all we kept talking about it,” he recalled.

Back in the offices after the shoot, the crew resumed watching the coverage on a TV in the common room usually tuned to Animal Planet. “You were just waiting for that next second when the wheel touches, thinking of all the things that could go wrong,” Sharkey said.

Late in the afternoon, at a 24-Hour Fitness facility in Glendale, manager Francisco Felix had noticed a TV report about the troubled plane as he walked in front of a bank of televisions hanging above rows of cardio machines. But Felix didn’t stop and he noticed that people continued their workouts. He retreated to his desk and about an hour later heard clapping from the gym floor. The plane had landed.

But everyone quickly returned to their routines.

“It just seems like there is so much going on in the world that maybe people are just used to another thing going on,” he said. “I mean, we’ve got the hurricanes and Iraq. It takes a lot these days to get people to notice.”