Remember that scene in Airplane! when the guy who can craft a pterodactyl or a brooch out of a piece of paper pulls the plug and makes the air-traffic-control tower go dark?

The gag was funny in the movie, but it wasn't funny at all when a similar episode happened at Logan yesterday. An aviation worker cut the wrong cable and put out communications at the airport for two hours.

Joe Dwinnell at the Herald City Desk spoke to someone at the Boston FAA and discovered that "a technician working on the 19th floor of the control tower at Logan International Airport sliced the communication link by mistake at 11 a.m."

The good news is that the back-up systems were fully functional. Two dozen inbound flights were held back, but it could have been worse. Everything was back to kind-of normal at 1:00 pm.

Image of "Airplane Johnny" from answers.com.