Oh Shit!

I’ve been on a good number of flights by now. I feel as comfortable in the sky as I am when peeing in my wetsuit between sets. This flight I just disembarked from, a short 2 hour jump between Karratha and Perth, was the first flight were a felt, only for a split second, that I was about to die. This may sound dramatic, but at the time it felt very real. And it wasn’t just me, you could sense that everyone on the flight felt a momentary emotional impulse of “Oh Shit!”.

To start with, the turbulence was throwing the plane around quite a bit throughout the flight. But any experienced flyer would have hardly taken any notice to the motion, and would have gone about their routines of alternating between hanging their heads in their laps and awkwardly tweaking them from side to side on the stiff seats. It wasn’t until the final approach that I, and everyone else with the slightest sense of self preservation, in our heads went “Oh Shit!”.

As we made our descent, I noticed that the buildings and vegetation seemed to be zipping by at a slightly more rapid rate than I’m used to. My initial thought was that due to the strong winds that had been causing all the shaking and free falling, the pilots had to maintain a good air speed in order to keep the craft stable. Couple hundred meters of air between us and the ground now, the plane was shifting from side to side a bit, nothing overly concerning. Less than a hundred meters now, we were almost at eye level with the Koalas in the gum trees lining the runway when, WOOSH!. We were suddenly hit by a strong gust of side wind that violently pitched the plane at a strong angle to the left. I watched out my window as the left wing came within about 20 meters of contacting the concrete. Oh Shit! The dangerous angle was quickly corrected, but by then we were going too fast and in the wrong alignment to land. The back wheel screeched as they hit the runway, the plane bounced once, and the pilots maxed the throttle. The engines roared and we were back up in the air, shaken but uninjured.

Luckily the second landing attempt was a success, this time into the wind on a different runway. I hope we use that same runway to take off on my next flight to Sydney.