Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Scariest flight yet

We had our group's annual strategy meeting at Kumarakom earlier this week (I will write about that and the Poovar visit soon). We returned last night and it was one of the scariest flights I had ever been on. When we took off, it wasn't too bad. But once they served dinner, it started moving around a bit, enough that they had to suspend the service. Then we hit a giant air pocket and the plane fell what seemed like a few hundred feet. Everyone was thrown up, only the seatbelts kept them on their seats. The dinner wasn't as lucky and plates and spoons and food was all over the cabin. The rest of the flight was bad, but luckily we didn't hit any more air pockets. Everyone was counting the minutes till we landed. As the pilot announced the landing, we began to relax and from the window, i could see the airport surroundings as we descended. But, there was no sound of the landing gear deploying and sure enough, we started to gain height again and were in full take off mode. There was no word on why this happened for around 10 minutes and this only heightened our fear that there was something wrong with the plane. After some time, the pilot came on and said that the conditions were too bad for landing and put on some music to calm the passengers. We stayed in the air for around 30 minutes more. All this time, it was raining heavily and the plane was getting thrown all over the place. People were very tense, many of them closing their eyes and praying for a safe landing. Finally, at 10:50, almost 90 minutes after we took off, the plane came in for the final landing. This time, the landing gear deployed properly and we made it safely to the ground.

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