Erik Brady: Jennifer Lawrence doesn't hate Buffalo. She also doesn't have fond memories of her last visit

The small plane in which she was a passenger was about to make an emergency landing at Buffalo Niagara International Airport four years ago. The incident made momentary news at the time, but mostly because an Oscar-winning actress was involved. Then it was quickly forgotten hereabouts. Now we know how close to disaster it actually was.

 The article is pegged to her new movie, “Don’t Look Up,” an end-of-the-world comedy with Leonardo DiCaprio that opens in theaters today and comes to Netflix on Christmas Eve.

The flight took off on June 10, 2017, from Louisville, where she had been visiting her parents. She was returning to her home in New York. The private plane was supposed to land at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.

“I know, flying private, I deserve to die,” Lawrence says in the story. (This sort of sly awareness of her own celebrity is part of what makes her so appealing.)

The Hawker Beechcraft B40 aircraft was carrying two crew members and two passengers: Lawrence and a family friend who happens to be the doctor who delivered her and her two brothers. The plane was cruising at 31,000 feet when they heard a loud noise. Then, according to the story, “the air pressure in the cabin went kind of rubbery.” The doctor visited the cockpit to see what was up. He returned, ashen-faced, to tell Lawrence that one of the engines had failed.

The pilot decided to divert the flight to Buffalo. This is why such planes have twin engines: They could easily make a safe landing with one.

Then, on their descent, somehow the second engine failed, too. The plane dipped wildly, and Lawrence could hear the cockpit alarm clanging.

“My skeleton was all that was left in my seat,” she tells the magazine. “We were all just going to die. I started leaving little mental voicemails to my family, you know, ‘I’ve had a great life, I’m sorry.’ ”

Karen Valby, the journalist who wrote the story, interrupts to wonder why the apology.

“I just felt guilty,” Lawrence says. “Everybody was going to be so bummed.”

Her dog, Pippi, was sitting in her lap at the time.

“That was the worst part,” Lawrence says. “Here’s this little thing who didn’t ask to be a part of any of this.”

She looked down at the runway in Cheektowaga and saw that it was “awash with fire trucks and ambulances,” as the story puts it.

Then she began to pray: “Not to the specific God I grew up with, because he was a terrifying and very judgmental guy. But I thought, Oh, my God, maybe we’ll survive this? I’ll be a burn victim, this will be painful, but maybe we’ll live.”

This being Lawrence, she then cracks an irreverent joke about said prayer: “ ‘Please, Lord Jesus, let me keep my hair. Wrap me in your hair-loving arms.’ ”

The plane hit the runway, bounced, and slammed into the ground again. Rescue crews broke the jet door open. Lawrence and the others emerged physically unscathed, “everyone crying and hugging,” the story says.

ABC News aviation expert Col. Steve Ganyard said at the time that losing two engines is “extremely rare. … Anytime you have both engines on a twin-engine airplane stop working, it obviously has the potential for disaster.”

Lawrence later boarded another plane to take her to Teterboro. But first, the magazine reports, she “anesthetized thanks to a very large pill and several mini bottles of rum.”

As for Nietzsche’s aphorism that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, Lawrence thinks that’s wrong.

“It makes me a lot weaker,” she says in the magazine. “Flying is horrific and I have to do it all the time.”

“Don’t Look Up” is a social satire starring Lawrence and DiCaprio as scientists who warn an unheeding world that an Everest-size comet is hurtling toward Earth. It is a metaphor for climate change.

Who knows? Maybe someday Lawrence could make a movie about her fraught landing in Buffalo. They could call it “Don’t Look Down.”

Or “Silver Landings Playbook.”