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| Tactile Foothills of the Rockies, Alberta, Canada February 2013 For more Thematic muted colors, please click here. |
Today? Not so much. Flying has gone mainstream. Despite moanings over high fuel costs, it's a relatively cheap way to travel long distances. The great unwashed, often wearing little more than flip flops and ripped t-shirts, have replaced formal-attired passengers. Getting to the plane is now a tension-filled nightmare of inhuman security gauntlets and surly "customer service". And once you get on-board, you run into doofs like this. Or this. Or worse.
But once you get past all the modern-day messiness of commercial aviation, it isn't that hard to get back to basics. Just you, a window, and a camera. Because the scenery that slips by can be ridiculously lovely. And you wouldn't want to be so ticked off by all it took to get you to this spot in the atmosphere that you couldn't be bothered to take it all in.
On this day, in this place, I was glad I did.
Your turn: Your worst flying story is/was...?
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2 comments:
Lost my wallet in Oregon, and had to fly to Boston! to get to Columbus. So getting onto the plane in Oregon was a hassle, with no photo id. And then my flight to Columbus was from a different building in Boston...so I had to go out through security and then have an even bigger hassle getting back in again than I did in Oregon. It was one long day...
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This is a long long story, but I'll keep it short. I'm sitting in a window seat just behind the wing on a sold out flight from Washington DC to Los Angeles. Shortly after take off we're informed that the plane has lost almost all instrumentation, they have so much fuel on board that we are going to continue to Los Angeles anyway. As we are getting close to LAX, they tell us that the fog has rolled in and they can't land with the instruments. We got there and circled around for a bit waiting on the fog. It finally started to clear. Oh heck, this is going to be long anyway! Sorry...
We are on final approach and getting lower and lower, we finally break through the fog and just as we are about to touch down, they realize that they've overshot the touch down zone and the pilot has to floor it and we go up through the fog again. We go around for another attempt and down we go through the fog and again it is clearer at ground level. This time the pilot touches down and puts on the brakes and hits the thrust reverse. We are aren't slowing down much though. He REALLY hits the brakes then and it was clear that we were skidding down the runway. The plane was starting to skid sideways. In a few more seconds the right wing (that I was sitting behind) was now leading us down the runway. Yes, we were skidding almost totally sideways. People on my side of the plane (those that were still looking) could clearly see the barrier at the end of the runway racing up to meet us. When we finally came to a stop, the freaking wing was OVER the barrier!
Whew... It's late and I should probably edit this, but I'm too tire...
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