Yesterday I went on my kind of regular trip to Narrabri, NSW. This requires getting up at 5:30am for a 7am flight, which is bad enough. But the way home is a 2-leg trip, dropping passengers at Moree, before the final leg back to Sidonee arriving 9:30pm.
During the day, there was a spectacular subtropical storm front – the sort that rolls in quickly towards you from the horizon, makes the sky really dark, and the lightning flashes all around. Afterwards, the already sodden ground was covered in puddles that the already saturated clayey soil just couldn’t take in (for those unenthused, this is exciting stuff when your city has been in drought for a few years...).
The aeroplane – a 36-seater, 2 propeller thing – took off amidst the continued rain and electrical storm. Soon after, things got a bit turbulent. People took it with amazingly good fortune – sharp drops in altitude were met with excited “ahhhh!” and “woooooo!” noises, as if we were on the Mad Mouse. After being jolted suddenly to the left, up and down repeatedly with a few successive sudden drops in altitude, I began to wonder how long we could keep suddenly dropping in altitude without coming dangerously close to the ground!
But enough. Those thoughts are hardly helpful! But I did wonder how everyone else could manage to continue to treat this like a scary show ride… I suspect it’s the “you might as well laugh, otherwise you’d cry or be sick!” mentality. Another sobering thing at this point was that the person next to me was beginning to turn up his air vent, and rummage around for his sick bags. He didn’t find one. I checked and had two, and gave him one quickly. The journey continued like this for the whole flight which should have been 25 minutes, but I’m sure took far longer. Unlike my poor companion, I wasn’t sick several times, but I did use my bag to breathe into to mitigate mild symptoms of hyperventilation.
They grounded us for 1.5 hours in Moree airport, and we all did our best to recover, while being subjected to American game show, followed by American detective show, and finally American cop show. I watched in apprehension as a teenage boy wolfed down milk and biscuits at the airport, while the rain and lightening raged on outside.
Finally, we were off on the home leg of the journey, estimated to arrive home 2hrs late. Being a longer flight than the last, we were able to cruise above the clouds, and divert our journey inland to avoid much of the storm. The first 15 minutes were bad (more people reaching for the plastic-lined bags, including milk and biscuit boy), but much of the rest of the journey was quiet enough for a snooze.
This flight is now knocks my 2001 flight from Mildura to Melbourne off my “most harrowing flight” list.
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