Re: Scary Air Travel Experiences
 

All of my scary air travel experiences have been self induced.

Re: Scary Air Travel Experiences
 

I was on a flight from Dulles to Denver with stop in Charlotte once, that was about to land in Charlotte, almost down to ground level, then suddenly climbed away. The pilot announced that they had to abort the landing due to "conflicting ground traffic", then made a big circle and landed. I have no idea how close we came to hitting the plane, truck on runway or whatever the heck it was.

Post deleted by Mat Sklansky
 

Re: Scary Air Travel Experiences
 

I was on a plane that got popped by lightining while we were taking off. Pretty scary.

Re: Scary Air Travel Experiences
 

Blueman,

I have a friend who is a president of a company. He always books his flight based on the age of the aeroplane. Good to do if you have the money and time.

I have had two semi-scary airplane moments. Once I was flying into Washington DC. The plane kept getting lower and lower over the Patomic River. I was about 5 seconds away from screaming my lungs out when the wheels touched the ground. I had forgotten that the airport boardered the river.

My other one was in Nashville. There was a hurricane coming and it was raining like cats and dogs. The pilot comes on and says "If we don't get off the ground in the next 20 mins we aren't going anywhere." I'm thinking that is fine with me. I don't want to try and outrun a hurricane in a freaking airplane.

We did manage to take off and jackass next to me said "Get ready for a bumpy ride." I did manage not to crap my pants through a rollercoaster of a flight.

One last story. An airliner crashed into the mountians in China. For the millions they spend on each air craft they didn't get around to translating the warnings into Chinese.
The alarms are going off and the last talk on the tapes is the Chinese pilot saying "What means pull up, pull up?"

Topset72

Re: Scary Air Travel Experiences
 

english is the official language of air traffic, the pilots have nobody to blame but themselves.

Re: Scary Air Travel Experiences
 

[ QUOTE ]

My other one was in Nashville. There was a hurricane coming and it was raining like cats and dogs. The pilot comes on and says "If we don't get off the ground in the next 20 mins we aren't going anywhere." I'm thinking that is fine with me. I don't want to try and outrun a hurricane in a freaking airplane.

We did manage to take off and jackass next to me said "Get ready for a bumpy ride." I did manage not to crap my pants through a rollercoaster of a flight.


[/ QUOTE ]

I had a similar one at dulles. A huge thunderstorm is close to hitting us, and we are like 3rd in the takeoff queue. We see both of the other planes take off into menacing looking clouds, and the pilot comes on saying if we dont get off now, we are going to be delayed like an hour. I'm sitting in my seat thinking I don't care about the wait, let the storm pass. As I'm listening to the air traffic control (it was a united flight), I hear they are abandoning the air traffic control tower due to a tornado warning, so we can't take off. So the air traffic tower is about half a mile away in plain view, and we are in an airplane in the middle of a runway.

I don't know exactly what would happen if a tornado were to hit a plane, but either way I'm sure it isn't good. Anyway, the storm just starts pelting the plane and the winds are pushing it around on the ground, but after about 30 minutes the storm passes, ATC returns, and we takeoff for a relatively smooth flight. Apparently because we tried to takeoff but couldn't do it because ATC fleed, we got at the head of the queue when the ATC came back. If we hadn't even tried, we would have had to wait behind 20 planes. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but apparently that was the situation according to the pilot.