Tag Archives: airplane

Pilot thinks planet is oncoming plane

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If you’re afraid of flying, click away now!

Air Canada's mid-air drama over the Atlantic: Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it's Venus!

Still reading? Well, you know that mid-flight feeling – you’ve been in the air for a number of hours, passengers are resting, catching a movie or reading quietly. The cabin lights are dimmed. Every now and then, a flight attendant brushes past.

Imagine, then, that there’s suddenly the most terrible turbulence. The plane is in a steep dive. Your worst nightmare actually happening – terror unfolding as the aircraft judders towards the ocean.

Passengers not wearing seatbelts – many of them asleep – are slammed into the ceiling and overhead bins. Laptops go flying.

When the plane levels out 46 seconds later, the passengers and flight attendants who bounced off the walls are left nursing injuries. You can hardly believe your luck that you’re still alive. Little do you know that a US military plane has just passed underneath – too close for comfort.

No, I haven’t been watching too many episodes of Air Crash Investigation, a programme that has me gripped a little too often. This is based on news reports of an incident that took place over the Atlantic Ocean on an overnight Air Canada flight from Toronto to Zurich on January 14 last year.

At first, it was blamed on ‘severe turbulence’, but what actually happened has just been released.

It seems a sleepy pilot, who’d just woken up from a 75-minute nap, mistook the planet Venus for an oncoming plane and forced his jet into a steep descent – nearly causing a collision with the real plane flying 1,000 feet lower.

The first officer, who was permitted to nap on transatlantic flights, had been awakened by a report that the US Air Force cargo plane was approaching at a lower altitude. Confused and disorientated, he saw Venus and thought it was the other jet heading straight towards them – hence the terrifying dive.

In the co-pilot’s defence, Venus was surprisingly bright that night – a groggy pilot could easily have mistaken it for another plane, say astronomers. Not only does the planet ‘not twinkle’, it looks like a steady, white spot of light in the sky – more like a lantern than a star, and very similar to the headlight on an airplane.

Every time my DH goes to work, I always tell him, ‘Don’t land in water’ – not that I think he ever will (I never worry about him flying – I honestly think the drive to the airport on a 12-lane highway is more dangerous, and, besides, my fears tend to focus on more subliminal things like a crashed tanker sending our compound up in smoke). But by calling out these words, it’s a sort of knock-on-wood precaution, I guess.

Next time, though, I might be tempted to add, ‘And don’t forget darling, Venus doesn’t twinkle (and nor will she come into the cockpit to serve you coffee!).’ Don’t you think it would help if I had my very own Swarovski diamond to illustrate the difference, eh, DH? After all, they practically grow on trees in Dubai!

The joys of child-free travel

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As a preface to this post, I very rarely get to do this. Honestly! If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I nearly always travel on stand-by with two over-excited small boys in tow – in economy and in a bad mood.

This time was different – so different, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven …

So there I was upstairs on the double-decker A380, seated rather conveniently right next door to the on-board pub, with free-flowing booze, cocktails and delicious canapés just a step away.

With 14 hours of back-to-back, uninterrupted ‘me time’ ahead, I literally couldn’t believe my good fortune. I’d been on stand-by, hoping to accompany DH on his trip down under, and got the last seat in business class.

As any mum reading this will attest to, the chance to do nothing but watch chick-flicks, listen to music and leaf through magazines – while drinking wine – for a whole day under the twinkly stars of a superjumbo’s ceiling is a ‘pinch-me-now’ dream come true.

Fine dining in the sky: The after-dinner cheese platter

‘Should I watch a movie now or later?’, ‘Recline the seat into a bed and have a nap?’, ‘Or go to the bar?’ ‘Read a novel or Good Housekeeping?’ When these are the only decisions you have to make – and the seat can even give you a massage – stress vanishes faster than you can say ‘white wine please!’

There’s even wi-fi up there – as if the 1,200 channels on the TV aren’t enough – and each seat has its own mini-bar. With so much to do, 14 hours isn’t long enough. I must have been the only person on that plane who didn’t want to get off when we finally touched down 12,000 kilometres later.

The only slight blip on the horizon was that, years ago, I used to be really scared of flying and, despite being married to a pilot, I’m still terrified of turbulence. If DH is next to me, I’ll grip his hand and ask anxiously if everything is ok or if we should get into the emergency brace position. This flight, he was working part of the way (they have two crews on board for such a long flight) and resting in the crew rest area when he wasn’t on duty.

Every now and then, he’d pop up to see me, wearing his sweater as a disguise.

We were high up over the Indian Ocean and I was just reaching a novel state of zen-like calm when he appeared and, hiding a cheeky grin on his face, whispered to me in hushed tones, ‘There’s a serious malfunction.’

‘I wanted you to hear about it first,’ he said sagely, the twinkle in his eyes not noticeable due to the dimmed cabin lights.

You know when you’re sure someone’s joking, but there’s that moment of terror when your heart seems to skip a beat – well *that* was that moment.

Nice one, DH! He made up for it the rest of the time though – and I quickly rediscovered my mile-high nirvana, such are the joys of child-free travel.

Saturday evening in Sydney and down by the Opera House it's buzzing

My hat trick on the airplane

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You may have noticed that BB wore the same hat all summer long.

It’s a mini pilot’s hat that we bought while living in the States.

He’s never really shown much interest in it until now and had only worn it once before, when we went trick-or-treating in the US.

But this summer he became so attached to it, he’d hang it on his bed post and, every time he got up in the middle of the night, would actually remember to put it on.

His hair underneath has even moulded semi-permanently to the shape of the hat and now forms a quiff at the front that I think looks quite cool, though DH isn’t so sure.

Since he’s never become attached to an object before, I did wonder if it was because he was missing his Dad during our five-week sojourn. How sweet, I thought, imagining it was a link to DH, whose busy flying schedule meant he was working out of Dubai for most of the summer.

But then we found out the real reason.

“Will the hat be coming back to Dubai?” enquired my mother one evening.

“Yes,” he replied adamantly. “There are birds in Dubai too.”

“Birds?”

“Yes, I don’t want them to poo on my head,” he said, almost shuddering at the thought.

Turns out that, despite laughing at his brother at the time, he’d been quite disturbed when we found a bird dropping in LB’s hair earlier in the holiday.

I did tell him that it’s actually good luck if a bird dropping lands on you, but, no, the hat’s staying on apparently.

Until a little incident on the plane ride home almost landed me in deep trouble.

It was all going really well, thanks to a very noisy baby nearby who actually made my two look quiet. So there I was, basking – for the first time in five years – in the glory of being the mother of the less disruptive children, when BB handed me the hat for a minute to put his headset on – and I lost it.

Somehow, due to being sandwiched between two boys, three meal trays and all our in-flight paraphernalia, I’d totally lost track of it. We searched everywhere. BB crawled on the floor. I got down on my hands and knees too. But to no avail.

BB thought he might have left it in the toilet, so checked every single loo on board. I asked a flight attendant if it had been handed in, but she didn’t quite catch what I was saying and thought I was after the captain’s hat as a freebie.

Until, finally – after landing – a lady three rows behind suddenly produced it. How it got back there, I’ve no idea, but, luckily, it let me off the hook and BB’s avian coprophobia (fear of bird poop – I know this, because, ever the journalist, I looked it up) is being kept under his hat.