Sunday, February 12, 2012

Flying the friendly skies

LMS with Minnie Mouse on our last trip to Disneyland in May 2009 (almost three years ago-look how tiny she is!)

We had a layover on the way home from Florida, with the connecting flight being on a tiny prop job. You know, the kind that rattle like they're about to fall apart? Yeah, one of those.

Our flight had been delayed because the original crew was stuck in some other city because of a canceled flight, so we waited around for a couple hours for an available crew to fly in.

It had been raining off and on most of the day, and the weather didn't improve once we were in the air. There was a lot of turbulence, which was lots of fun {or not}. At one point there was a flash of light right outside the front of the plane and a loud *POP* and the plane jerked a bit. We all freaked out, wondering if an engine had gone out or something, but the plane seemed to be flying ok, so that didn't seem to be the problem.

The stewardess, who'd only been on the job for about 6 weeks, immediately got on the phone with the captain, but turned around so we couldn't see or hear anything.

After a few minutes of hurried discussion, she hung up and started slowly working her way towards the back of the plane, checking the overhead bins, and whispering "it was just a lightning strike, everything's ok".

Not terribly reassuring. Why didn't they just make an announcement over the loudspeaker?

LMS looked up at me and asked "why are you hanging onto me so tightly?"
Me, trying  not to scare her "Oh, just because"
Big smile "That was fun, we should do it again!"
"Uh, no, thank you"

We landed without problems, but it didn't build my confidence in little prop job puddle jumpers. What's your scariest flying experience?

1 comment:

  1. Yikes. Glad everything was ok! Flying gives me bad anxiety...sometimes anyway. The worst flight for me was a super snowy day when I was flying to Ohio for a week. I'd had a bad feeling about the flight all day for whatever reason. We were delayed for an hour or so because of the weather. When we finally got the ok to go, we started speeding down the runway only to have the pilot suddenly stop the plane at the last minute. I have no idea what happened, but it was not fun at all. When we finally got up in the air, there was awful turbulence the whole way to Chicago. I don't think I've ever been so excited to be in Chicago before or since! :) The rest of the flight to Dayton was uneventful.

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