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A Hilton Head pilot put his wheels on the ground in Tokyo exactly one minute before the earthquake hit.
Talk about timing. When pilot and Hilton Head Island resident Nick Esposito landed his United Airlines Boeing 777 at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport at 2:45 p.m. Friday, March 11, he wondered if the touchdown had damaged the wide-bodied passenger airliner’s landing gear. The plane, with its 275 passengers and 13 crew members, was shaking a lot as it taxied off the runway.
One single minute after Esposito guided the giant aircraft safely to the ground, Japan was rocked by a massive, 9.0-magnitude earthquake.
“We were wobbling quite a bit, and then the (air traffic control) tower went hysterical and we couldn’t understand what they were saying,” said Esposito, who has flown for United for 26 years. “We were the last airplane to land. They diverted all other traffic coming in.”
The earthquake was the fourth largest in the world since 1900 and the biggest in Japan since modern instrumental recordings began. Four days after the experience, Esposito was still shaken. “I got home Sunday afternoon, and (two days later) I’m still tired. We were fortunate no one was hurt and most of the passengers and all of the crew were able to leave within a couple of days.”
The worst parts of the ordeal, he says, were the initial confusion, being stuck in the airplane for six hours during the earthquake and its aftershocks and the tension of waiting for a flight out in a nearby motel while the tremors continued virtually non-stop.
“We had just flown in on a 5 1/2-hour flight from Bangkok, we were exiting the runway — making a turn — and we felt shaking. We weren’t taxiing as smoothly as normal. The tower told us to stop the plane. In the next 10 or 15 minutes, we felt three big quakes, but we didn’t know it was an earthquake at first. We saw other planes that would have been landing go around. Things weren’t adding up.”
As Esposito’s plane sat for three hours on the taxiway, he watched in apprehension as people poured out of the traffic control tower and terminal buildings. He did his best to comfort his passengers, assuring them they were safe in large aircraft. But he noticed buildings moving, and the 200-foot-tall tower swaying “quite a bit.” “I thought the terminal building was going to collapse,” he says.
The plane moved to a remote parking area for another three hours, and crew and passengers passed the time with news reports, movies, music and snacks. “We were about to run out and had just made arrangement for more food and water when we were allowed to get off the plane. They sent buses to us,” he says.
About 75 percent of his passengers were destined for the U.S., and 25 percent for Japan. He and the crew stayed in nearby motels, finally securing flights out on Sunday.
“The worst part of was sitting in the motel feeling the tremors. It makes you tired because you’re constantly on edge about the next shock coming,” he says. “I knew it was time to get out. You could tell it was going to be a mess for a while.”
