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Oh, scary! I am glad I wasn't with them
Jan. 15th, 2018 05:20 pmMy colleagues have just returned from a work trip to Poland. The note they left on the door last week had said that they would be back on Thursday, so I was kinda surprised when the notes were still there this morning, and hoped that nothing had gone wrong. It turns out that the trip was far more of an adventure than they had expected, since they were on the plane that had an emergency landing last week.
C. tells me that they were given half an hour warning (in English) that it would be an emergency landing and that they would be told when to brace for it, and that after landing they should leave everything behind and get out of the plane as fast as possible. That was the last announcement that was made in English. Then the plane circled for a good 25 minutes longer before finally starting its decent. She tells me that she was starting to be really stressed from heightened tension/anticipation from the long time spent circling (which was probably to use up as much fuel as possible to reduce the risk of explosions, but, of course, no one told the passengers anything, at least not in English).
She said the passengers all remained calm, at least on the outside, as they circled. Then, when the time came, the young flight attendants didn't use the microphone, but instead just shouted in Polish for the bracing, and then, when the plane had stopped, shouted the Polish equivalent of "Go!" or "Get out!", or something. She tells me that the fact that they were shouting really raised the ambient stress levels and made everything more of a panic situation, with the result that people were practically trampling one another to get out. She has some minor scrapes and bruises on her arms (I am not clear if they are from the landing or getting out, and I don't know if she knows, either).
Apparently after that they spent six hours of waiting at the airport, but then they got their stuff back. She tells me that the managed to keep it together for the rest of the trip, and on Thursday's flight home (three different flights), she was so focused on "get home", that she held it together just fine. However, after landing in Luleå at 10:00 Thursday morning, instead of returning to the office, as she had originally planned, she just went home and shook. She says that she really feels like she is a different person now than before the trip, and that at random intervals over the weekend she would just start crying (even when doing the dishes). She made it in today, but is just talking to people and filing an incident report and requesting that the uni provide some counseling (even though she isn't normally the kind of person who even thinks about such things). She also plans to ask the travel agency to not book any of us on that model of plane again, since she has heard that there have been some 21 incidents with that model in recent years.
Now, I just need to keep in mind that air travel is much safer than car travel, that I have personally known more people who died in car accidents than I know people who have been scared in emergency plane landings, and not worry about my flight on Friday. (This should be easy, since I don't tend to worry, but something about typing it up has the me that exists just at this moment wondering how I would cope with such a situation, and I hope I need never find out.)
C. tells me that they were given half an hour warning (in English) that it would be an emergency landing and that they would be told when to brace for it, and that after landing they should leave everything behind and get out of the plane as fast as possible. That was the last announcement that was made in English. Then the plane circled for a good 25 minutes longer before finally starting its decent. She tells me that she was starting to be really stressed from heightened tension/anticipation from the long time spent circling (which was probably to use up as much fuel as possible to reduce the risk of explosions, but, of course, no one told the passengers anything, at least not in English).
She said the passengers all remained calm, at least on the outside, as they circled. Then, when the time came, the young flight attendants didn't use the microphone, but instead just shouted in Polish for the bracing, and then, when the plane had stopped, shouted the Polish equivalent of "Go!" or "Get out!", or something. She tells me that the fact that they were shouting really raised the ambient stress levels and made everything more of a panic situation, with the result that people were practically trampling one another to get out. She has some minor scrapes and bruises on her arms (I am not clear if they are from the landing or getting out, and I don't know if she knows, either).
Apparently after that they spent six hours of waiting at the airport, but then they got their stuff back. She tells me that the managed to keep it together for the rest of the trip, and on Thursday's flight home (three different flights), she was so focused on "get home", that she held it together just fine. However, after landing in Luleå at 10:00 Thursday morning, instead of returning to the office, as she had originally planned, she just went home and shook. She says that she really feels like she is a different person now than before the trip, and that at random intervals over the weekend she would just start crying (even when doing the dishes). She made it in today, but is just talking to people and filing an incident report and requesting that the uni provide some counseling (even though she isn't normally the kind of person who even thinks about such things). She also plans to ask the travel agency to not book any of us on that model of plane again, since she has heard that there have been some 21 incidents with that model in recent years.
Now, I just need to keep in mind that air travel is much safer than car travel, that I have personally known more people who died in car accidents than I know people who have been scared in emergency plane landings, and not worry about my flight on Friday. (This should be easy, since I don't tend to worry, but something about typing it up has the me that exists just at this moment wondering how I would cope with such a situation, and I hope I need never find out.)
