The frightening truth about we all miss … and why I will never get on a plane again: Candida Crewe

On a flight that comes in to Heathrow from Belfast 20 years ago there was a wind so strong that it should have had a name.

The plane was like a sailboat on the high seas and threw this way and that. The pilot was in the cockpit, presumably struggling with the control wheel and the random thrust of the engines of the aircraft. Perhaps he was vaguely disturbed when he tried not to land once, not twice, but three times – every attempt more frightening than the previous one.

Do you know that roaring like the engines of an airplane? You can imagine the sight, from your pathetic plastic window, from a runway where the angle is completely wrong, when the quickly approaching soil is not the way it should be-under your chin but parallel with your temples.

Both hands fell at the end of each armrest, but I risked one to disconnect to pull the sick bag out of the net bag in front of me, while balls of sweat formed over the little one of my back and face, and my breathing shot to panic mode.

The aftermath of the Air India Crash on Thursday, when a plane on the way to London found the accommodation of doctors in Ahmedabad

More than 200 people were killed when the plane crashed only a few minutes after taking off

Even in my fear I could see all around me that my fellow passengers continued to read their papers and sip their plastic glasses of water or gin, as if they were on a sunny river cruise on a piece of mirror water for the whole world.

I remember thinking, what’s wrong with these people? We are all going to perish and they are so drunk or so thick that they don’t even realize! Why am I the only person who has insight into our terrible situation?

If, as they say, you have just as much chance of dying in a plane crash as winning the lottery, my loter number – and theirs – was clearly up.

I was too scared – or, perhaps ashamed – to scream and make a fuss in the face of collective denial by others in the cabin. It felt like I was getting gas lit by them.

Eventually we walked through the air and on to the asphalt with an almighty series of folds and it took me a few seconds to acknowledge that we had not crashed and still lived. It marked the moment that I fell out of love with flying.

When the news from the terrible, tragic Air India -Crash came on Thursday, just like everyone else, I was shocked and upset. Everyone with some imagination could have cried at all with thoughts about the fear that poor passengers must have experienced before they died.

“As a young woman I jumped on planes with the Cavalier attitude of the majority of the flyers,” says Candida Crewe, but now she is much reluctant to fly

I knew neither a connection with one of them, but my heart goes out to them. One of my sons recently returned from three weeks in Goa during an Air India flight to Gatwick. It is ridiculous and selfish to claim any idea from what the families feel, but nevertheless felt that thin comparison disturbing enough.

We have been killed more often by a shark attack or giving birth apparently giving Quadruplets to die in a plane crash. That is probably the reason why most people who go on board every year of the millions of commercial flights (35.3 million in 2023) do this in a spirit of nonchalance and optimism. We all know that it is safer to travel in the air than on the roads. In the period between 2018 and 2022, global death risk per boarding (an airplane) was one in 13.7 million.

Perhaps that is the reason why the news from Groot Airplane crash is touching us so hard. We know that the statistics are in our favor – until they are not suddenly and shocking that are not – and the lively images of throwing black smoke, geranizing hull and destroyed buildings are brought in in our memories in a way that is not an image of a car accident.

Whatever the statistics try to make me believe, I will never be convinced.

The truth is that we can try to comfort ourselves with disappearing opportunities, but be thrown into a metal sausage in the air is not something that can easily justify the human mind as safe or reasonable.

Marco Chan, a former pilot of the airline and senior aviation teacher at the new University of Buckinghamshire, has countless facts and figures that witnesses that flying is much safer than other transport methods, but even he admits: ‘I always say that it is good to be afraid. Fear of flying is not irrational. You hand over the control to people you have never met, in a machine that you do not fully understand, thousands of feet in the air. That is a big question. ‘ Rather.

As a young woman I jumped on planes with the Cavalier attitude of the majority of the flyers. What happened to that carefree 25-year-old who used to jump on a plane than a bus?

Perhaps it was about ten years ago a flight to my sister’s wedding in the US state of Montana, when the turbulence struck and beckoned certain death. How was it not when we were pulled into the air in a cocktail shak in heaven?

God, what do I hate turbulence! I know, I know, planes are designed to resist, but turbulence is becoming increasingly aggressive and dangerous.

Do you remember the flight last year when a 73-year-old British man died of a suspected heart attack and 104 were seriously injured during a flight from London to Singapore, when the serious turbulence hit and fell more than 160 feet in four seconds? I do.

And flying over the Atlantic is becoming turbulent. The next time I want to go to America, it will be on the Queen Mary – even if it takes five days, it is roughly expensive and I am not overly enthusiastic at sea.

So America, I fear, is out.

Maybe I just have to bring myself together and instead find out the words of Marco Chan: you don’t have to like flying and you don’t have to understand all the systems. But you can take comfort, knowing that you never fly alone. Your safety is supported by thousands of professionals, pilots, cabin crew, engineers, controllers and inspectors, who turn it into their full -time job to get you safe every time. ‘

But the fact still remains that she not Safe yourself there every time.

In the past 30 years I have been on 12 flights, tops. I have not been to a long -distance flight for ten years or more and there must be a very good reason for me to catch the plane instead of training for a short draft journey. I forced myself to fly to Sevilla a few years ago for the 60th of a friend, in which the bumps let me break up in sweat and I promised that I would never fly again.

Now everywhere on board a flight must really be for exceptionally good reason. My last domestic was three years ago – a single flight to Inverness to come together with someone again. It turned out to be one of the most romantic occasions of my life, and we stay together to this day, so that was a quantity of white knuckling above Loch Ness worth.

Even better, he hates it even more than me.