About the author...Michael Martin (pictured front row, far right in the 1981 photo) is a retired veteran of 25 years on the Eden City Police Department, and has penned a number of anecdotal writings recalling his experiences.

This was about 1988 and we had felony warrants on a fellow and learned that he was in jail in Omaha, Nebraska. I contacted the governor's extraditions office and got permission and funds to go retrieve our bad boy. Buddy Moretz and I boarded an airplane in Greensboro, North Carolina for a short hop to Raleigh where we were to board a plane for Dallas, where we were to switch to a plane to Omaha.

The first leg of our trip went smoothly, we changed planes in Raleigh and we took off. This was a week to the day after a large jet had fallen up near Chicago and killed a couple hundred people, No one told me a jet engine could backfire. I always insisted on the window seat and when the pilot fed the fuel to his engines, the bird climbed fast and we were about two thousand feet up when the engine backfired. This backfire sounded like a stick of dynamite had gone off in the toilet. I froze, thinking, there was no way in %$#@* I was gonna survive this kinda fall......Statistic!! that's what I was, a *&%$# statistic!....

I looked around and the stewardess was going about her duties, no one else was screaming and as soon as my heart rate got down below 200.....I breathed again....the rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, we changed planes in Dallas and flew into Omaha, We got our boy and drove back to the airport, Now Bud and I had trouble on an airline prior to this because we were armed, this time we decided not to carry weapons.

When we boarded the airline, the pilot made us take the handcuffs off our boy, he did not know we were unarmed. The flight was, to say to least, worrisome. We landed in Dallas on our way back and had a short layover and we went to a restaurant. I told our boy that we were in Texas now, and Texas had the "Fleeing Felon law" that if he tried to escape, we could legally shoot him. He believed us and behaved real well, after our meal, we recuffed him and boarded the plane home and I stopped by the pilot's cockpit and told him we had a handcuffed man. On this airline the pilot said "Fine."

We were about to land at Raleigh and the pilot came down thru the clouds, lower and lower, soon, I could see the houses, then I could see bikes and tricycles in the yards, they I could identify the breeds of dogs playing in the yards and read some of the numbers on the mailboxes, I looked real hard and it dawned on me that there was something missing........an airport!!! There won't no #$%^ airport down there!! The pilot was going to sit us all down in the middle of a housing project.....well, about then, the pilot must have woke up and looked because I felt the engines getting a surge of fuel and we began to climb and I thought that was real good because we was messing up TV reception by this time....we made about three thousand more yards and I saw an airfield and felt somewhat better.

The only problem was, that with the extra boost of power, to make the field, when we finally touched terra-firma, we were going a hundred miles per hour faster than normal. When we passed the place where we should have stopped, we were doing over a hundred miles per hour and a few thousand yards down the runway the pilot had to reverse the engines and stand up on the brakes. When the pilot finally stopped the plane and turned it, the wing hung out over the end of the runway. I turned to Bud, "this is the last one Bud." his face was a little drawn. "I don't care if we have to drive to Alaska, this is the last time I am getting on an airplane." We never did learn if Texas had a Fleeing Felon Law.