Obama airplane incident much more serious than reported

By GottaLaff

This is scary, but thankfully, there was a happy ending:

The incident involving Sen. Barack Obama's campaign plane last month was much more serious than the airline or the Federal Aviation Administration said, according to FAA control tower tapes obtained by ABC News.

At the time, an FAA spokesperson said the pilot did not declare an emergency and the airline owner, Midwest Airlines, said safety "was never an issue."

The tapes, to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' World News with Charles Gibson, show otherwise.

Just 41 seconds after discovering he no longer had full control of the plane's up and down movements, the pilot told an FAA air traffic controller "at this time we would like to declare an emergency and also have CFR [crash equipment] standing by in St. Louis."

An FAA spokesperson acknowledged today that its statements at the time of "no emergency" were wrong, based, the spokesperson said, on erroneous reports from FAA air traffic managers.

"We later learned there was an emergency declared," FAA spokesperson Elizabeth Cory said. The FAA had not publicly corrected the record until today, after being contacted by ABC News.

Obama's plane, an MD-81 chartered from Midwest, was diverted to St. Louis, shortly after takeoff from Chicago on July 7. [...]

Unbeknownst to the pilot, an emergency evacuation slide had inflated inside the tail of the jet, affecting control cables there.

As the jet landed safely in St. Louis, Sen. Obama called his wife and, apparently unaware of the drama in the cockpit, tried to laugh it off. [...]

The Obama campaign had chartered the MD-81 from Midwest while its current campaign plane, a Boeing 757 chartered from North American Airlines, was being reconfigured. It was put into use on July 20.

Wow. (click here to listen to an edited version of the audio)