In 1999, I was working for American Express and we had a big meeting in Bermuda. The weather was shit and our plane ended up aborting the landing twice and returning to Newark. People ran to the bathrooms after the pilot announced we wouldn’t be making a third attempt. The flight attendants handed out all the booze. Never had fear of flying before this but I was so messed up I went home because the weather forecast for the next day wasn’t great either. But people who did go made it in safely.
Someone on the island photographed our plane basically coming in sideways and it was in the local paper. One of my colleagues in New York that was on the flight with me made t-shirts that said “I survived Flight 481” (which I still have out of superstition).
After 25 years of “exposure therapy” aka continuing to fly, I don’t break into a cold sweat when landing any more. But I still have my superstitions about flying and get twitchy if an approach gets bumpy.
Not sure what my point is other than it usually doesn’t matter how much work one puts in around processing a trauma, there’s always going to be a little dust in the corners.
There are a few flights and landings that stick in my mind.
In the late 60s or early 70s, I along with a number of schoolfriends flew from some airport in the UK to Ostende in Belgium in a Douglas Dakota. The airline was, I think Dan Air. On the flight out the sole cabin crew a doughty female shouted at us kids "Come on you lot, some of you sit up here at the front or the pilot will never get this thing off the ground" the pilot one Captain Abrams, bounced us down the runway at Ostende so heavily that some of the suitcases burst open.
Another memorable one was coming in to land at Colombo, Sri Lanka during a tropical storm we could see out of the aircraft windows that it was raining buckets and the wind was blowing so hard the palm trees were almost flat on their sides and I thought "He will never try landing in these conditions, surely" but he did and it was a perfect landing!
