They say flying is the way to travel and although I’ve flown from time to time I’ve never been convinced that it is. The incongruity of being hurtled through the air at unimaginable speeds in a flimsy aluminium tube and being totally reliant on engines made in the Rolls-Royce factory by unionised British workers potentially on a Monday causes me a good deal of anxiety.
And I’ve had my share of anxious moments in the air.
The first was when I was about seventeen years old flying from Christchurch to Palmerston North one afternoon in a DC3. We were about ten minutes out from Christchurch when smoke started to ooze out from under the door in the wall that separates the cockpit from the passengers. A white-sleeved arm shot out around the door and the hand attached endeavoured to grab the fire extinguisher that should have been on the wall. It wasn’t; the bracket designed to hold the extinguisher was there, but not the extinguisher. The whole body belonging to the arm and the hand that I assume was the co-pilot then emerged and went running down to the back of the aircraft and found an extinguisher still in its bracket and ran back to the pilot’s enclosure, closing the door behind him.
The plane then banked steeply and headed back to Harewood, losing altitude very quickly. We appeared to be fence-hopping and the passenger sitting in the window seat next to me decided we were going to land in a paddock. I casually told the person sitting in the aisle across from me: “We’re going to land in a paddock.” This unsubstantiated piece of information spread around the cabin like wildfire and although there was no panic as such, I’ll swear I could hear silent prayers being offered up.
In fact we landed back at the airport, albeit at the far end of the runway and were met by two fire engines with their sirens screaming at full amplification. I have often wondered since why they needed to use their sirens; they were hardly going to encounter any traffic on the grass verge alongside the runway.
There was no stairway wheeled in to disembark us and so we jumped on to the tarmac and had to trudge a fair distance back to the terminal. It was only then that we were told we were never in danger; it was just that the radio set had caught fire. I noticed however that the toilets were getting well-used.
I had another frightening experience in a 737, this time flying from Christchurch to Wellington with the gallant pilot attempting to land in a howling southerly. After two aborted attempts we were taken back to Christchurch, put up for the night and then flown to Wellington the next morning when the weather was more clement.
An NAC pilot told my father back in the 1960s when the airline shifted its operations from Paraparaumu to Rongotai that the new Wellington airport was an accident waiting to happen. “Cross winds from the hilly terrain were deadly,” he said. Whenever I’ve needed to fly to Auckland since then I have opted to go via Palmerton North, despite the fact that there has never been an accident at Wellington, but a Dash 8 crashed while coming in to land in Palmerston North, killing a flight attendant and three passengers in 1995.
I had another anxious time in a Dash 8 flying into New Plymouth one winters night in heavy rain with an electrical storm lighting up the sky all around us. The pilot told us he was circling the airport hoping to find a break in the clouds. As my white-knuckled hands gripped the arm-rests it occurred to me if there was no break we may have to stay up there all night. Fortunately he found one.
Without doubt my worse ordeal was flying out from Belem, an equatorial city on the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil. A few days earlier I had been given a couple of sightseeing flights over the rain forest in a six-seater Cessna and had experienced electrical storms that made the New Plymouth incident seem tame by comparison.
I was flying back to New Zealand on my own via Miami. We were in an A300 Airbus owned by Varig Airlines and about an hour out our pilot told us in a voice that reeked of nervousness that there was a problem with one of the engines and that he was heading out to sea to dump the fuel then landing back at Belem. This information was relayed by a man sitting next to me from Mozambique who could speak passable English as well as Portuguese. The only word I had picked up from the pilots pronouncement was “problemo” which was chilling enough.
We were put up for the night in a grotty Belem Motel and then taken back to the terminal next morning and told that the engine had been repaired while we slept and they were ready to fly us to Florida. Some of the passengers were reluctant to board as they had been on the plane where the flight had originated in Rio de Janeiro and reckoned it wasn’t performing properly on that leg. They didn’t believe it could be fixed in a few hours and tried unsuccessfully to get Varig to get us another aeroplane. We were given no choice; the next flight to Miami was a week away so we either took the potentially faulty plane or waited another week. Most of us went on the offered aircraft which got us to our destination without further incident.
We all clapped enthusiastically when the plane landed.
I’m full of admiration for those local investors who are endeavouring to put in place another aluminium tube to fly us to Auckland. However if I need to get to the city of sails I’ll probably take the car. I accept this decision makes no sense if I have safety in mind. In every bend on the road I risk encountering a drunk driver, a tourist, someone talking on a cellphone, a drug addict, a person texting, a speed-freak, someone devoid of sleep or a boy racer.
Flawed thinking I know, but despite potential fatal injuries, at least I’ll be on terra firma.
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