Over the last week I have been absent from SN. At first it was because I flew back home to Texas last Saturday and my flight left at 6 am. By the time I landed and my parents picked me up at 8:30 in Houston I did not feel good at all but figured it was due to the stress of work and the early flight. Around noon my mom insisted on taking my temperature and welp I was running 101 degree fever. Like most guys I thought I wasn't that sick and could fight my way through it but after my fever hit 102 I realized I needed to go to the Dr. on Monday and well he ran some tests and bam.... Flu Type A Positive.

On Monday and Tuesday I did everything I could to break my fever for 24 hours so that I could fly back to DC and quickly was able to kick it. The last time I had to take meds was Monday night so I was cleared by my Doc to fly back to DC yesterday. Nonstop flights from Houston to DC are either early morning or evening/night flights and I flew back yesterday on the latter.

For the last few years I have flown into DCA or Ronald Regan in Virginia. This airport butts up against the Potomac River and if you have seen the news the last ~24 hours you can see where I am going... My flights either land at DCA around 9 or 10 pm and more often than not the flights I am on beat the arrival time by 20 minutes or more.

On my flight yesterday at 9:21 the pilot floored the engines and banked hard to the right almost to the second that we were supposed to be entering our final decent into DC. You could see the city in the distance when this happened and it threw a lot of us. We were then told that we would be rerouted and their had been an incident at DCA and the pilot would update us when he knew more. A couple of minutes later he told us their had been a plane crash at the airport and at the same time my phone started to blow up with notifications of the horrific incident that had occurred.

Thankfully I was in contact with my parents and they were able to tell people who called them, since my friends and other family members could not reach me, that I was safe and it was not my plane that had been hit and crashed. At first out pilot told us that they had been able to reach 4 people immediately and so it sounded like their were going to be survivors. It was only after I got home after 11 pm last night I learned that those initially picked up people were dead and their would not be any survivors.

A few people today from work knew I was flying in yesterday and they also checked in on me last night and today in person because it is known I land between 9 and 10 at DCA. My heart goes out to all the family and friends of those who were lost yesterday. There were 64 on the airplane and 3 on the helicopter that went down with no one surviving. It is a horrific and gut renching day in DC. Personally I just went through the motions today because it was so close to home for me. It fell within the range of the flights I fly into DCA just this time was a 9:40 landing instead of a 8:40 landing.