Christmas Death Plane

I am a decent flier. I don’t necessarily enjoy it, but I’m not one of those freaky people that will drive thousands of miles across the country because they are too afraid to face their fears. Rationally, I recognize that it is one of the safest ways to travel. And in fact, once the plane hits cruising altitude I’m always fine, even if there is turbulence. It’s really just take-off. Even understanding the physics of flight, I can’t get past the fact that I’m hurtling down a long stretch of pavement in a metal tube at some ridiculous speed. It just feels inherently wrong. It’s like I’m trying to cheat nature and am going to end up losing…via a horrific fiery death.

But like I said, for the most part I’m a decent flier. That goes out the window, however, when I fly on a propeller plane. Now, I have flown in puddle jumpers on a handful of occasions in my life. And all of those experiences were unpleasant, in that it’s loud as hell and you end up spending half the flight staring at the propeller, willing it to continue turning. Kind of like, “Hail Mary, mother of goooooooooooooooodooooooooh shit what the fuck was that?!” It’s also slightly disconcerting whenever you have to actually walk outside the airport terminal to the plane, because the plane is too small to connect to a gate. Or when they have to weigh everyone’s luggage to make sure the plane doesn’t pull an Alliyah. I mean, how am I supposed to stay calm if YOU’RE concerned that the bottle of hootch in my suitcase might kill us all?

Not that you know how I feel, I’d like to share that the boyfriend and I recently traveled to New Hampshire to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas with his family. I, unfortunately, had some major work jump on the 26^th and as a result we had to fly – whereas normally we would have taken the Acela train (pretty much the only way to travel, I might add). And since we were flying into a small airport in New Hampshire, I had a sneaking suspicion we would be flying a propeller plane. I cautiously checked the boyfriend’s itinerary, and it stated we would be flying a “Saab Turboprop”. The fact it had “prop” in the name wasn’t a good sign. The fact it had “Saab” in the name was probably worse. My boyfriend said, “Huh. I wasn’t aware Saab made planes.” Neither did I. I found this picture online of the exact model that we flew:

In all honesty, the plane ride to New Hampshire was uneventful. It was a very short flight with no turbulence, and even though it was foggy as hell for the landing, I was never concerned. We mentioned repeatedly to his family over Christmas that we had to fly a propeller plane up but were amazed and how little drama it was. We should have kept our cake-holes shut.

Christmas night we had a bad spell of weather. It was windy and rainy, and apparently we had a pilot who had just earned his wings. I’m also speculating the pilot was 9 whiskeys into his evening and having a “White Christmas” via some seriously strong blow. The flight was short, but still managed to be the longest 40 minutes of my life. Time literally stopped. We had major turbulence that began the second we got into the air. In addition, there was no air circulating and all the passengers were pouring sweat. Not that I noticed the heat, however, as I was a little more concerned at the problem at hand. When we were descending into LaGuardia, the sensation was that we were hurtling towards the runway at breakneck speed, as if the back of the plane was on fire and the pilot needed to get us down immediately at all costs. At this point, I was thinking two things:

1). I am going to spend Christmas evening deceased.

2). I hope that woman who got hit and injured by a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon AND had her upper east side apartment hit by that Yankees player in a small plane isn’t on this flight, because damn that bitch has bad luck and you know this shit would be going down.

Suffice to say, we landed (or else you’d be mighty curious how some random atoms floating above Queens managed to sign into Blogger). The pilot, probably flying on angel dust at this point, let us down at some preposterously skewed angle and with a nice gut-busting bounce.

So there it is, one of my bleakest flying stories to date. What’s yours?