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Extreme flights
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What is the worst experience you have had in the air? Is bad turbulence a thing of the past now?
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Well my worst experience was comming into land at Bournemouth and we where just about to touch down when a violent gust of wind blew the plane off to the side so we where not over the runway any more. The pilot though, cool as you like just picked it up and some how shuffled us back on to the run way. Probably done it dozens of times, I think most of the rest of us had brown underwear after that!
I'll raise that the whole experience of a two hour internal flight in nepal, where the plane had no seperation between passenger and pilot, the seats shook, the plane had to rev up before taking off. A fully terrifying two hours.
If you're asking to investigate before flying the first time, then seriously, most flights are smooth, calm and hassle-free, especially in the summer.
Went on honeymoon last year and sat behind an elderly gent who let rip several SBDs over the course of 4 hours. Wonderful.
Came back from Brussels one winter during a storm; it was like riding a roller-coaster. On the same flight I found a pebble in my meal and notified a stewardess who calmly put it in her pocket and walked away! What pebble?!
Seriously though, turbulence can kill; a large British jet literally shook to bits near Mount Fuji in 1966 due to strong winds, and in 1985 a jet was slammed into the ground at Dallas airport by a microburst. A few years ago a passenger was thrown into the plane's ceiling by a spot of turbulence and died of her injuries. Ergo it isn't a thing of the past but don't worry as you're more likely to win the lottery 4 weeks in a row than die in a plane crash.
Flew back from new York with a woman in front who talked loudly enough for the entire plane to hear her - at great length and ferocious tedium about her broken relationships, her sad life, and how the world was a really bad place to be. I don;t think the world is a bad place to be - but that plane, at that time, certainly was!
On a trip from London to Brittany, in a small, old aircraft, we were just approaching the cost and I was already sighing with relief thinking we were about to land ( I'm very scared of flying, you see ). We were also what seemed to me like VERY low and the only alternative to landing would have been crashing in the sea ( in my uninformed opinion ). All of a sudden , the plane did a U-turn and started flying back towards the water. Everybody in the plane were looking at each other, not saying anything, faces white as chalk. I swear I thought, (and I'm sure I wasn't the only one ) that the pilot had gone mad and had decided to crash us all into the sea ! I sincerely thought I was about to die . Turned out he had to turn around because there was no available runway yet ,and we landed safely a few minutes later. I would have happily jumped out as soon as the doors opened ! How good it felt to be on the ground after that, I can't describe !
Emergency stop.
747, Congo into Abijan, Ivory Coast. Small luggage trailer pulled out on to runway as we were doing 200mph down runway after having landed. Planes can do an 'emergency stop', so we did. Passengers, meals, aircrew, all went flying towards the front of the plane. It was scary.
One time we were leaving Congo, but the plane was broke, left engine wouldn't start. We had to spend evening back in town. Where we saw 3 guys being frogmarched towards an execution on the beach, having been found on the other side of the airstrip with heat seeking missiles, ready to down our aircraft. That was pretty hairy.
How far off V1 were you when you did your emergency stop, Marge?
I was once carried off the plane by men carying AK47's.
This was in a certain West African country back in the late 60's. We'd only been on an internal flight, but during the time we'd been in the air, there had been a coup d'�tat.
This is where I spoil it and tell you that I was only very young at the time, and these nice men with guns were just helping my mum and me off the plane !!
Years ago, I took a late-night flight from Los Angeles back home to Detroit. Luckily, I was exhausted and slept much of the way. Most of the route was plagued by severe thunderstorms, and I remember being jostled awake from the noise and bucking and rolling of the plane. At one point, during the meal service, we hit an air pocket (or something) that caused the plane to fall many feet suddenly. Those of us who still had our seatbelts on were unaffected, but I'll always remember the sound of meal trays crashing every which way, and a man a few rows in front of me who literally flew out of his seat upwards and hit his head on the ceiling.
I took my very first flight when I was 22. It was in a 2-seat Cessna and my buddy had just got his pilots licence. We drove to Southend airport, he checked off the aircraft and off we flew into the bright blue sky. The plan was to circle over my house about an hours flight away. I'm a little nervous but enjoying it all and Mike knows exactly what he's doing. About 20 minutes into the trip he says, "I'll show you some of the controls. If I move the joystick this way, we go left." and we bank sharply round. "If I move it like this ..." and we bank sharply to the right with me hanging on to the seat. "And if I pull it back we go up," and we lurch up on a steep climb. "Mike," I say, "just stop for a while, this is making me ill." But he wants to show me the final manouvre, a rollercoaster descent towards the ground. I'm feeling really sick at this point and ask for something to throw up in. "There's bags behind the seat," he says. Twenty seconds of frantic searching and I find nothing. Things are getting desperate. "You'll have to put your head out the window!" I lift the latch on a window about the size of an A4 sheet of paper and try to squeeze my face through it. Completely ignorant of our speed, I haven't taken my glasses off and the wind rips them from my face and I seeing them disappearing in a blur. My stomach can't hold back anymore and I throw up, just about able to get most of it through the window, although scrapes remain on my beard. Somewhere in Epping, a few hundred feet below someone is about to get a nasty surprise. Mike is laughing like a hyena and I'm sitting beside him, blind as a bat, tasting the remains of a half-digested lunch. Pretty funny now, miserable at the time!
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