You land at Queen Alia International at 9:40 PM. You have no cash, no SIM, and no ride. In that order, you can fix all three in about an hour. Reverse it, and you’ll be paying a taxi driver in a language you don’t speak yet while your phone sits dead in your pocket. The sequence matters more than the effort.
I learned this lesson the hard way. Not in Amman, actually, but the shape of the mistake is the same everywhere, and it has a name in aviation history: the crew of United Airlines Flight 173, which ran out of fuel over Portland in 1978. The pilots were so focused on troubleshooting a landing gear indicator light that they never got around to the fuel check. They had a checklist for it. They just didn’t run it in the right order, and the plane came down in a neighborhood six miles short of the runway.
The Lesson From Flight 173
Captain Malburn McBroom and his crew were circling Portland, working through the gear problem with the help of a mechanic on board. The National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the crash is blunt about what went wrong: the crew’s attention was locked on the malfunctioning indicator, and the fuel state, which was fine at the start, ticked quietly down to nothing. The board found that the crew failed to monitor the fuel properly and never even acknowledged the flight attendant’s warning that the fuel gauges were reading low. The plane had enough fuel to land. It just ran out while everyone was busy with the wrong problem.
The fix was so simple that the industry rebuilt its training around it: run the fuel check first, in order, before anything else gets your attention. What became known as “cockpit resource management” starts with the idea that a simple checklist, followed in the right sequence, beats heroic improvisation every time.
Your first evening in a new country is not a crash landing. But the mechanism is identical. You have three legitimate tasks in front of you, and one of them quietly becomes an emergency if you leave it too long.
Why Cash Comes First
Your first job at any arrivals hall, Amman included, is the ATM. You do this before you touch your phone, before you argue with a driver, before you look for the SIM vendor. Jordan runs heavily on cash for the small stuff, and even where cards are accepted, the smallest transactions, a coffee, a shared taxi, a shawarma, will move faster and friendlier with dinars in your hand. The ATM is also the one thing that doesn’t need a working phone or a local number, so it’s your best shot at a win on a night when everything else is foreign.
Why the SIM Comes Second
Now you can buy connectivity. You want a local SIM before you need to show anyone a map or a confirmation code, because the moment you step out of the terminal, someone is going to ask for a ride destination or a hotel name, and you want to be able to look it up. Get the SIM at the arrivals hall kiosk, not at a random shop in the city later, because the airport vendors are set up for exactly this: new arrivals, no local documents, no fuss. The data plan is cheap, the coverage is fine, and the whole thing takes five minutes.
Why the Ride Comes Last
Only now do you order your ride or walk to the taxi rank. You have cash to pay with. You have a phone to show the address and to call if there’s a problem. You have a working number so the driver can reach you, and you can check the route instead of staring at a stranger’s dashboard wondering if this is the right way. The sequence turns the single most intimidating moment of the move, the first car ride into the unknown, into a transaction you control.
The Order Is the Strategy
Here’s the part that actually matters, and it’s the part I got wrong: the order only works if you treat it as a rule, not a suggestion. The moment you’re tired and it’s late, the temptation is to grab a taxi first because it’s the most visible option, and solve the rest later. That was Flight 173’s exact trap. The gear light was loud and obvious. The fuel gauge was quiet. So the crew fixed the loud thing and forgot the quiet one, and the quiet one is what brought them down.
Back to McBroom for a second. The NTSB report is worth reading if you’re the kind of person who likes to know why things fail, because it doesn’t frame the crash as a pilot error story. It frames it as a systems story. The crew was competent. They were just in a high-stress situation with no checklist discipline, so they drifted toward the most attention-grabbing problem. The industry’s answer was to make the fuel check non-negotiable and to train crews to follow the sequence no matter what noise the emergency was making.
Your answer is the same. Write the three jobs down before you land, or open Aqee’s Day 0 checklist on the plane, and promise yourself the order: cash, SIM, ride. When you’re standing in the arrivals hall at midnight and the taxi drivers are calling to you, your checklist is what tells you to walk past them to the ATM first.
The win is not that you got to your accommodation. The win is that you got there calm, with money in your pocket, a working phone, and the feeling that you handled this. That feeling, the quiet confidence that the new place isn’t actually in charge of you, is the whole game. You got it by doing three small things in the right order.
