In Defense of Land and Sea Travel

I'm back from NZ and mostly rested! It was an awesome week, and I had a wonderful time. The only thing I'd rather never repeat was the flight home. 

I loved to fly when I was little and did quite a bit of it. At the time it was cheaper to take a Friendship (DC10, I think they were?) down to Dunedin from Christchurch than it was to drive, so my mum took my little sister and me with her to visit my auntie by plane quite often.

It was great. The ladies in the funny uniforms with the extremely neat hair would come around and offer you free hard lollies to suck to keep your ears from popping. Free lollies? Really, my standards for happiness as a six-year-old were pretty low. But still, it was great. I remember searching for God in the clouds and generally doing all those cliche things that kids on their first flights do.

Turns out that I'm even easier to impress these days. All I require for a flight to be considered fantastic is not to die. By those standards, both of my flights were amazing. Nonetheless, I'm not sure I'll ever do it again. From now on, it's cruise ships for me! You see, if a ship breaks down, I am an excellent swimmer. If a plane breaks down, I cannot--sadly--fly. My flight home made that pretty clear.

It started out great. Not a lot of turbulence at all until we got closer to Australia and even then it wasn't bad. The pilot told us that there was a bit of fog at Tullamarine but that it was almost gone and was unlikely to slow us down. The turbulence we had was due to a tail wind and so we got to Melbourne really early. I'm not sure by how much, but it was a lot, over forty minutes if my phone was correct before I turned it off.

That's when things started to go a bit pear-shaped.

We did the usual thing where you go lower and lower and your ears pop and you clear the clouds and there's the ground and--ooh--a runway and then suddenly the plane started to climb again. Really hard with engines straining the way they do in movies when the pilot is trying to avoid a mountain he had somehow not realized was right in front of him.

I'm pretty sure there weren't any mountains so I had no idea why we pulled back up over the clouds with ear-popping swiftness.

We banked sharply several times, went up and down some more. It seemed like we were coming in for another landing but didn't get down as far this time and went back up again. By now we'd been circling Melbourne for what felt like about twenty minutes, but since I'd obediently put away all my electronic devices, I have no idea for sure.

The pilot came on the intercom to tell us that there had been some "technical difficulties" they'd had to deal with and that now Melbourne wanted us to land on the South runway (the longer of the two runways at Tullamarine). 

Aside from yelling the words "Brace! Brace! Brace!" there aren't many things a pilot can say that I like much less than "technical difficulties." Still, he assured us that we were still well ahead of time and should be on the ground in five minutes.

We were most definitely not on the ground in five minutes. More banking, so steep I could see the ground right below the wing on my side. More going up and down, looking like we'd land, and then not doing it. I won't even try to pretend that I was taking this well (I had my hands clasped in front of me and I was praying for all I was worth, and in my opinion, I'm worth quite a lot), but I wasn't taking it as badly as some on the plane--which makes me feel braver, at least. I'm not the worst flier, just maybe the fourth worst or so.

Finally we came in for an approach that looked like it'd stick. The ground was coming up fast and bam, we hit it with a heck of a thump. It was by far the roughest landing I've felt in 8 international flights and heaps of domestic ones. It took my breath away, but that wasn't the scariest thing.

You know how when your plane lands, there's all that roaring and noise as it brakes and then you come to a stop fast enough that the g-forces pull at you a bit and there's usually a whole lot of runway left at the end of it? Not so much this time. The whole plane shuddered and rattled so hard, people let out cries that matched what I was feeling but was too terrified to express. I caught glimpses of emergency vehicles outside. The tires screeched underneath my seat. The vibration was terrible and worse still, the plane did not seem to be slowing down.

In the end, it took the whole runway to stop. From what I could see, there wasn't anything left ahead of us. It was the sort of stop where you could just feel it was a fight to stop the plane.

There were cheers and whoops, but none of the crew said what had happened, and to be honest, I didn't want to ask. I'd prefer to think that maybe there was too much fog still around (although I have to say I didn't see it. The airport looked pretty clear from the sky), or that the pilots were trying some different (if not very pleasant) method of landing or something. Whatever it was, it didn't feel like a normal landing and it scared the dickens out of everyone on board. No one else asked what happened either. If they were like me, they were just so damn pleased to be getting off that plane that they didn't care about how we'd stopped, just that we had.

There wasn't anything on the news about it, so I guess it wasn't as big of a deal as it felt. All I know is that I've had dreams about dying in a plane crash since I was old enough to know such a thing is possible, and I kept thinking to myself as we landed that I was about to experience it for real. Ironically, we still arrived five minutes ahead of schedule.

Yep. Totally taking boats from now on.

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