There I was holding at 10,000 feet in my Douglas DC-9, 45 miles southwest of Pittsburgh International Airport, with 6,200 pounds of fuel. This is the amount that I was to arrive at the parking gate with. When from my assistant in the right seat comes this statement, "When are we going to ‘bug out’ (leave) this holding fix and go to our alternate field?" I asked, "Where should we go?’ He said "Cleveland or Columbus?" I replied with, "Pick one." He picked "Cleveland because I know the airport really well I used to live there." I did not have the heart to tell him that no matter which one he picked it may have been a very quiet approach because the fuel gauges would be reading near zero The humor of the story is that the weather at Pittsburgh airport was 6,500 broken, visibility 20 miles. Why were we holding? Some military KC-135’s were dinking up the arrival airspace. So the other guys had to wait. I could not believe that my first officer would have left a perfectly good Visual Flight Rules (VFR) airport to try and land at another airport 200 miles away.

What to do in this dilemma? Ask for PRIORITY HANDLING. The controller will now know of your situation and give you minimal vectoring. Nothing guaranteed but you now have their attention. The controller could have taken us over the top of the airport to land on another runway. (The runways are 32, which was active, 28L, 28C, and 28R). Best of all there is no phone calls or paperwork that will be required to fill out. The other radio call would be EMERGENCY. Now you will be a special delivery to the airport. What CAN happen is that you may be asked to call the tower after landing and tell them the nature of the EMERGENCY. If the FAA gets into it they MAY ask you to send a written report to the FAA local office about the flight, within the next 10 days. It usually ends there unless you give way to much information that the FAA feels they can use against you.

Later that week the DC-9 and I had to deviate to Springfield, IL (SPI) from the holding pattern 60 miles west of St. Louis, because of a line of thunderstorms north of Lambert Airport that were moving south. I called over to Lambert Tower and they said that they had shut down the airport. (Approach control did not know this yet). A call to TWA dispatch to announce my
deviation also got me the required paperwork sent to SPI operations so I could "fly" the airplane from Springfield, IL to St. Louis, MO. I then called Trans World Express ramp at SPI and place a fuel order. Upon parking, I was met by four good old boys with a fuel truck who were not used to seeing a big airplane at 2300 hours (that is 11:00 p.m. for the mathematically challenged). As I assisted in the fueling process one of the old boys named Lester said, "yeah, last month this guy called the Springfield tower saying he was low on fuel. His location was 18 miles East of the Springfield airport. The tower issued a heading for Springfield. The pilot
responded with Decatur, IL was his home airport (25 miles away) and that he was going to head there. Well the darn fool did not make it. Ya know, FUEL IS BRAINS."