The emergency lights came on and the phones were working, so we called the front desk. No worries, the desk clerk said, it was a scheduled test of the emergency generator. We should have been told about it at check-in but somebody forgot.

Reassured? Not entirely.

I grabbed my pocketbook, car keys and flashlight (we always travel with a flashlight) and put the palm of my hand flat on the door to check for heat on the other side. Then we walked down 10 flights of stairs (even though the elevators were working) to the lobby and stayed there for nearly an hour, until the drill was over.

Overreaction? As it turned out, yes. But it’s not the overreactions that tend to kill you.

I have decided over the years not to rely completely on what I’m told in an emergency or anything that looks like one. Because when things are going wrong, the people in charge sometimes tell the people who aren’t in charge not to panic, to stay where they are.

It happened on the Titanic. It happened as the World Trade Center burned on 9/11. It happened as the Costa Concordia began to sink last month.

Disbelief and underreaction, it seems, are fairly common reactions to disaster. And even when there’s nobody in authority to minimize the danger, people will do it for themselves. The building is on fire but they don’t run. The tsunami approaches and they stay to watch.

So when I’m in a shopping mall and nobody is paying attention to the fire alarm, I calmly head for the door, anyway. And when the power goes out on the 10th floor of a hotel, well beyond the reach of any fire truck ladder, I take a stroll downstairs.

It always turns out that everything is fine. So far.

It didn’t, really. My fire safety precautions have consisted only of locating the stairways when I stay on a high floor and always having a small flashlight in my luggage.  I’ve never tried to find out when choosing or checking into a hotel whether it has sprinklers in the guest rooms. But after reading a recent Associated Press story on the subject, I’m going to pay a lot more attention to that detail.

The story explained that many hotels in the United States are allowed to operate without sprinklers because they were built before sprinkler systems were required. In many cases of fatal hotel fires, including one that killed four students in a motel outside Birmingham in January, a sprinkler system would have saved lives.

The story also described how the federal government requires its employees to stay in fire-safe hotels when they are on business trips, and that means buildings with more than three stories must have automatic sprinkler systems with sprinkler heads in each guest room. And it  provided a link to the U.S. Fire Administration Hotel/Motel Fire-Safety List, a database of hotels around the country that are certified fire-safe.

I’ve added that one to my bookmarks.

There’s another reason this issue catches my attention.  This week, my husband and I will be checking into the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, a name that is infamous in hotel fire history.

In 1980, a fire killed 87 people at the MGM Grand, which did not have sprinklers in guest rooms. That building is now Ballys, and a nearby building became the new MGM Grand.

Both hotels are now certified as fire-safe, with fully automatic sprinkler systems throughout, including in guest rooms. I feel better knowing that.

A British couple in their 70s paid Thomson Airways extra to sit in exit row seats on a flight to Egypt last month but were initially told at the airport that they were too old to fly in an exit row, as The Telegraph reports. As in the United States, regulations in Britain require that passengers in an exit row be physically capable of opening the emergency exit doors — but there is no upper age limit.

The couple was eventually allowed to sit in the exit row on the flight out, but said they were denied exit row seats on the return. Said the wife: ”Thomson must adopt a clear and cohesive policy about selling extra leg room seats.”

And that’s the problem right there. These are only coincidentally “extra leg room seats” even if the airline markets them that way.  They’re exit row seats, with extra space not so that passengers can stretch their legs, which is merely a nice side benefit, but so that all the passengers will have room to get off the plane in a hurry if need be.

That’s why there are restrictions on who can sit in an exit row, restrictions that necessarily run counter to our ideas about equal treatment and discrimination. Children under 15 may not sit in an exit row, nor may seriously disabled people or those who don’t understand the language spoken by the flight attendants.

I don’t know whether this couple was physically capable of opening the emergency exit door, which is the responsibility of those sitting in an exit row. And I don’t know how you go about determining who can lift a 50-pound door, unless you want to do testing in the gate area.

That leaves gate agents and flight attendants to make their best judgment calls. It’s probably pretty challenging to evict anyone from an exit row, and somebody who paid extra for it is sure to be extra indignant.

That’s why charging extra for exit row seats could, quite conceivably, compromise the safety of everyone on a plane. Because the people who can afford it aren’t necessarily the people who should sit there.

When I first heard about this, it sounded like a rough landing. When I saw the pictures, it looked like a crash. According to one passenger, “it was like being in a car accident.”

This illustrates again why passengers need to wear seat belts and be aware of evacuation procedures. Stop worrying about what to do if your plane falls out of the sky because there wouldn’t be much you could do. Instead, start figuring out what you do in case of severe turbulence and hard landings, survivable events where you need to keep your seat belt on and your wits about you.

The circumstances are nearly identical to those surrounding Air France Flight 447, which was lost on June 1, killing 228 people.

The Nov. 29 flight rode out moderate to heavy turbulence and proceeded safely to Paris, the Associated Press reports. French authorities are examining this case, hoping it will shed light on what happened to Flight 447.

Last week a Delta flight landed on a taxiway at Atlanta, and it now appears that the pilots were not entirely at fault. CNN reports that “approach lights and a ground-based instrument that helps pilots line up with the runway were off.”

Whether there’s any reasonable excuse in the Minneapolis case, which the pilots reportedly blamed on a heated discussion in the cockpit, remains to be seen. If not, they’ll lose their jobs. 

Maybe they should. But the fact is that pilots are human, and the little mistakes that you and I make when we miss an exit or take a wrong turn can end their careers — or their lives, and ours.

The flight from Rio de Janeiro was cleared to land on runway 27R but landed instead on a parallel taxiway. There was no traffic on the taxiway, and the jet came to a stop safely.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.

The Beechcraft 1900D, flown by Air Georgian on a code-share with Air Canada, left Bradley at 4:42 p.m. and landed at Burlington at 5:29 p.m., according to FlightAware.com. A replacement aircraft finally brought the passengers to Montreal, landing at 11:08 p.m., according to the site.

That must have been pretty frustrating for the passengers because Montreal is a two-hour drive from Burlington.