[seafox]

This is not about a LOS flight either but it is worth the story.

When I was 12(many years ago) my family was in Freeport, Bahamas and had to fly to West Palm Beach Florida. The day we were going to take off the morning was beautiful and everything looked perfect. What we did not know was that the coastline of Florida was covered with a tropical thunderstorm. We were on a 12 passenger, 2 engine prop plane and once we had boarded the plane, I noticed that no other planes were leaving the airport, including Boeing 737 jets. We found out later on that all flights excwept ours had been cancelled. We took off ands everything was fine for the first 20 miles of the 100 mile flight, except the sky kept getting darker. We were at about 10,000 feet and suddenly we hit the storm and it was so bad we were in a white out and getting bounced all over the place. 5 minutes later the lightning started and about 5 minutes after that we got hit on the left engine by a bolt of lightning and the engine caught on fire.The fire would not go out after the pilot shut down the engine so he decided to go into a dive to increase the airspeed to put the fire out. It was still very rough and the rain was still coming down heavily so we did not know where we were. The dive put out the fire thankfully but by the time we finally pulled out of the dive we ended up about 200' over the water, which we could finally see. At this poinnt the co-pilot yells "Get me the f*ck out of here".We flew like this in the storm for another 40 minutes(plane's speed was reduced and when we got hit by lightning were closer to Florida the the Bahamas so continued on rather than turning back) progressively getting lower and lower. We did not know it but we had been diverted to Fort Lauderdale, 60 miles further south. We finally reached Ft Lauderdale airport flying about 50' over the beach. Boy were we glad to get to solid ground. Little did we know that our trip was not finished yet. The airlines chartered a van to drive us to West Palm Beach. The driver would not take the toll road, even though the passengers said that they would pay the toll. So we headed north on US 1, a commercial highway full of businesses. The road was flooded out and full of accidents and it took 5 hours for what should have been an hour long drive. When we got to Palm Beach my grandfather told us that the storm had eneded in Palm Beach about 10 minutes after we took off but that it had stalled over Ft Lauderdale so after we were hit by lightning we flew into the worst part of the storm.

Needless to say I am not a big fan of small planes. I have been on a few in Fiji with worn tires and duct take patches.


Another one of my favorites was when I flew into the Solomons and then up to the Western Solomons. They use Twin Otters, a good plane. We took off from Honiara to go to Munda. The plane flies to Seghe and the takes a turn to head to Munda. We were on the way to Seghe when we hit a whiteout and heavy rain. They navigate by GPS and we watched the GPS count down, the pilot made the turn, and reset the GPS. The conditions did not clear and the GPS continued to count down as we got close to Munda. The pilot started our descent(there are some mountains in the Solomons) and we still could not see anything. I am in the back of the plane and can not see the altimeter but the GPS buzzer goes off and we still can not see anything. The plane finally comes out of the fog at 100' and we are already over the airfield about half way down so the pilot has to fly around, all of this in a plane with a 60' wingspan that is overloaded and only 100' off the ground. On the final turn the pilot, a young Solomon Islander, turns the plane on its wing so heavily that the stall warning goes off for 30 seconds. It fells like our wingtip is about to hit the water. We get straightened out and come in to land on a grass runway covered with about 6" of rain. We slip and slide down the runway and come to a stop with 20' to spare. On the return from Seghe to Honiara, the plane had a "mechanical" and was 3 hours late. By the time it arrived a huge rain storm had hit and the pilot, an older experienced English expat who was about to retire, came off the plane, looked at the passenger and luggage list and started shaking his head. We made it off the runway with a few feet to spare and got in to Honiara just in time to make our connecting flight to Fiji. Our luggage made it because the VP of Solomon Airlines was out on the tarmac in shirtsleeves in the middle of the storm helping the baggage handlers move our luggage.

And last but not least, there is the time when I was standing in line for the bathroom on a 737 from Curacao to Miami in some tiurbulence, and the plane hit a bad pocket of turbulence and dropped 200' and slid sideways and the drink cart, which the stewardesses put near the bathrooms, fell over and would have crushed a few passengers if I had not caught it and kept it from falling over.