Have you ever gone through the feeling that this might be your last day alive ? Well, that happened to us on the way to Merida. When I saw that we were going to board a small airplane on a pitch dark tarmac taxiway as we walked towards this plane, I said to Peter: ' haven't I told a thousand times that I hate small planes ? “ He didn't answer me. When we boarded, I noticed there weren't any lights inside this plane, just in the pilot's cabin and I counted 20 passengers in the dim light that came from the runway lights outside. We took off alright, the weather was very bad, furious winds and rain battered the small plane and at one point it felt like if the plane was going to flip upside down as it had already flipped sideways as
I could tell we were not flying straight; we had to hold on to the seat in front in order not to slip out of our seats and the wings of the plane were tilted sideways. When things couldn't get worse they did: We hit turbulence, bad turbulence and the plane was shaking like a milk shake in a can. I looked at Peter and instead of being scared I got cross with Peter and asked him: What airline is this? He replied: 'Maya Airlines' then suddenly the little plane plunged 100 feet in free fall; it looked like the pilots couldn't get any control of this sudden plunge and gust of wind. Everyone in the plane was screaming. I watched the pilots in the cockpit crossing themselves and I thought to myself: when even the pilots are crossing themselves it’s not boding too well. Then I turned to Peter and still cross at him I told him: You realize we are also going to fly over the Bermuda Triangle where ships and planes disappear without a trace and we are also flying with an airline no one has ever heard of, where small planes frequently fall of the sky like mosquitoes around here, we won't even appear in the news, no one will know where the hell we are. I thought about my friend Robert who doesn't like airplanes and Hector and our new house that I would not see finished and then I started thinking how we could survive if the airplane went down, thinking that maybe airplanes should have a large parachute in case it failed. The flight seemed interminable after what it seemed an eternity the weather got better and we could finally see the lights below of the city of Merida.
Phew! it looked like if everything was going to be fine after all. When we landed in Merida I heard a passenger saying she would have been better off travelling in a third class bus with the chickens! She thought that would have been a lot safer than this flight. If that was her first flight I'm sure it put her off for ever but I think I would have sooner travel in third class with the chickens had I known what an awful flight this was going to be.
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25 comments:
Hi Maria
Well I am now put off aeroplanes even more than I was before! Also marriage, since husbands always seem to get the blame. Ha, ha!
Seriously I am sorry you had such a dreadful experience. The pilots crossing themselves would not have inspired confidence.
In the old days when Saint-Exupery and his friends were flying over the Andes, it was even worse. Planes would be tossed up and down like feathers, and sometimes the engines would fall out.
I would definitely prefer being on a larger plane. How did you come to get on a small one?
That was not the airplane we were supposed to be flying on. The description of the airplane was a larger one. Peter knows about airplane models and he always chooses well which ones he considers to be safe to fly on. He says that when he saw that plane on the tarmac, he knew it wasn't the one described on the ticket but it was just too late so he didn't say anything to me in order not to alarm me. This is why I was so surprised to find ourselves in this small airplane. Peter has always told me that he would never consider flying on Aeroflot nor Cubana and some others airlines that have a bad flying record like that low cost American plane which recently had a gapping hole on the roof, due to metal fatigue. Anyway.. we survived to tell the tale.
Hi Maria
That was a very difficult situation, because you either had to go on the plane and risk it, or throw your plans into disarray by missing your connection. I wouldn't want to be on any plane at all, but if I had to choose I would choose the ones with the best record. The trouble is, nobody is guaranteed to have the plane they want, even if it's on the ticket. Have you complained to the plane company?
Yes, that is the whole thing, you always choose a recognized airline. No one has ever heard about Maya Airlines and neither had Peter this why I couldn't understand why he went against his own beliefs. An airplaine I would never fly in, is Cessna those are small private planes and they fall off the sky like flies! Only on the day we were flying to Europe in the Mexican airport they had a Cessna that had crashed in Honduras and there were no survivors. There is a T.V. programme Peter watches about airplane accidents. The last one was about the miraculous Hudson landing. We were in Guatemala when we watched on T.V.
The thing is do you believe in good luck or bad luck? Does luck exist at all. I would say if you take a risk
and come out well out of a situation you could say we had good luck. Everyone is going to die one day, and if no one takes chances, nothing could have been invented.
Obviously some risks you have to weigh in before you take them. Like a nuclear station, I wish that had never been invented.
If God had wanted man to fly,he would have given us wings.Or provided us with a pterydactal(prob mispelled,in fact im sure it is)to accompany us everywhere from birth,complete with a harness of some kind. But seriously why is everybody in such a hurry to get from a to b?Flying undoubtedly gets you there quicker,but at what cost?Look at the things you missed.Life is much the same,we all embark on a journey ,to get to our destination as fast as we may...the ultimate destination is death of course..but why not,instead of concentrating on the destination ,dismount from whatever vehicle you are using and take the time to look around occasionally....the route "there" is most likely infinitely more interesting than the destination itself.
Hi Maria
Some people are consistently lucky and others are consistently unlucky. That's what you'd expect given the odds - most people will be somewhere in the midddle with both good and bad luck, but there will always be people at the extremes who are always lucky or always unlucky. Of course, just because one has always had good luck or always had bad luck doesn't mean it's bound to continue - a lucky person'e luck can run out. I think I would fly somewhere if there was a chance of making a lot of money, but I would not fly anywhere for a holiday, because holidays don't mean much to me, so it wouldn't be worth the risk.
Of course, I know I must die some day but I'm putting off dying in the same way that I sometimes put off vacuuming!
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Hi Dougie! that is a surprise. This is for you and Robert, well.. the thing is that when you are short of time like we were, travelling by bus would have taken up the whole day and since the destination we were aiming was Merida, in order to have the time to explore Uxmal and the other Maya sites, this is the way Peter arranged it. In future we will use a coach from Cancun to Merida as we didn't see all the sites anyway and I also want to see the haciendas where they produce the ropes from the henequen plant. About luck.. I think is the choices you make in life that determine your "good" luck or "bad" luck. If I choose to rob a bank tomorrow it won't be bad luck if I end up in jail will it ? Is the choice I made that would put me there.
Dougie, God has given us brains to
invent wings and to fly like a bird, he has given us the opportunity to use our brains and discern with freedom what we want to do with this liberty. We are supposed to be the stewarts of this earth which by the way, we are not managing that well. The spaceships which have been sent to explore the universe how found that after surveying millions of planets, none of them has any life the way earth has, if we destroy this planet we won't have anywhere else to go to. The scientists still cannot grasp how unique our earth is. Why would anyone in their right mind would like to go to the moon or Jupiter? there is no water, no air, not even gravity. We know more about the planet Mars and the Moon than we know about our own planet. Isn't that crazy or what?
Hi Maria
Up to a point, people make their own good or bad luck. Unfortunately they also make good and bad luck for others. if you rob a bank, that''s your decision. But if you shoot the cashier, that isn't his decision.
If you shoot the chief executive of the bank, that's everyone's decision. Ha, ha!
Robert, I think your cashier forgot to duck ! Ha,ha
Seriously, you have posed a very interesting thought there, where chance can also determine a "good" or "bad" luck outcome but.. there is always a will.. to either overcome it or.. take advantage of the opportunity that life has placed in front of you to turn it into a good luck situation or..avoid it like a bullet coming to you!
Hi Maria
Well, overcoming obstacles makes us stronger. But if the cashier gets a bullet in his brain, he doesn't get stronger, he just gets buried. After all, unlike David Cameron or the Archbishop of Canterbury, who can function without a brain, the cashier needs his brain and he's pretty lost without it.
If you look at Japan, then sure, in retrospect you can say it was silly of them to build a nuclear reactor on a fault line. But as for the earthquake and tsunami - well, the only way they could have dodged that would have been to emigrate from Japan en masse.
You say: "unfortunately they make bad luck for others" very true, that sometimes evil or selfish decisions by a third party will adversely affect others that through no fault of their own lose their lives like the cashier example you gave. If Victoria was here, she would tell you that a cause has a reaction and a punishment (Karma) I would see that as Fate. When you have to go.. you will die there is no escape. The tsunamis and earthquakes can happen here too as the African plate is colliding with the European plate and cataclisms are inevitable but unlike the previous example people do have the Will to rebuild.
Hi Maria
I’m not sure I believe in karma. I don’t believe I’ve lived before.
As far as I understand the scientists, nature isn’t predictable except as a balance of probabilities. If you ran the world again from the beginning, some things would be different because matter and energy jump around for no apparent reason.
On a practical level we all believe we have free will. You could go for a walk with the most fanatical fatalist, and watch him when he crosses the road. He will always look both ways!
We only think we have free will..our characters determine how we will react to whatever stimuli.stamp on my toe ill shout ouch!ask me to strangle the little old lady down the road and Ill ALWAYS refuse......ask me to rob a bank and the only time Ill consider it is if I "know" I can get away with it....honesty doesnt come into it...we are what we are....pity is 99% of human race are loathsome despicable creatures so we know pretty well what their propensities are and whatr theyll do in most given situations.We are all sleepwalking through life if we but only knew it.
Hi Dougie
But we have the gift of reason. E.g. we know that people will fight for power, so we devise an agreed method of deciding who gets the power. That way the violence is left out of the equation. In the world of the apes, Cameron and Miliband would have to wrestle each other in the jungle. Instead, we decide which one gets in. It's far from ideal but we are at least smart enough to know that in a society where EVERYONE is crooked, NOBODY will prosper for long. So we rig things so that people will obey the rules out of self-interest.
I'm not sure about that Robert, Judging by what we are seeing in the Middle East where they are struggling for power with brute force and we are helping them to attain it by providing them with war planes, weapons, tear gas, mustard gas etc. What I meant with Freedom is that we are not battery hens or circus elephants but we have the freedom to go wherever we like and do whatever we like, right or wrong, it is our choice. We are going a bit off the tangent here about what constitutes "good" or "bad" luck.
Hi Maria
Well, in the Middle East there is no tradition of democracy, so in the absence of a universally acknowledged hereditary principle such as a monarchy, fighting is the only way to gain power. And afterwards, dictatorship is the only way to keep it.
I think good and bad luck are relative. If you go to your favourite restaurant and they have your favouritye dish, e.g. escargot, then it's good luck for you. But bad luck for the snails.
Funnily enough Democracy was invented in Baghdad of all places and it was a concept the Greeks knew very well but women and slaves were excluded from this democracy so this is not something that the west invented. The trouble is, that it can easily be lost if people don't vote for example.
Yes, bad luck for the snails but we are not snails we humans are in the unique and privileged position that we can change our destiny. There are those who fall on a whole and lament their bad luck and stay there but there are others who will say I got in a hole but I will come out of it.
Hi Maria
We can do a certain amount to direct our lives, the rest is blind chance.
Take the rise of Hitler. You could say that he got to be German leader through sheer will power. Certainly it seemed like a miracle to him. One moment, a tramp in Vienna. 20 years later, German Chancellor. 8 years later, master of Europe. But he began to believe that will power alone would conquer all, that whatever he dreamed of would come true. He discovered that Germany wasn't strong enough to beat the Russians, the British and the Americans at the same time.
Re the voting, I think there is more chance of democracy being lost if people actually do vote. The only way to stop the rot is to show the elite that they're not wanted, in other words, to ignore the elections.
About Hitler, it is not as though he won the lottery, he must have manipulated his way to the very top.
I'm surprised to hear this reply from a chess player!
Talking about the lottery, no is going to win it if the ticket isn't bought first. You might not win but there is the chance that you might. This is the perfect example of how someone can influence the outcome of good luck.
Hi Maria
Hitler wasn't a chess player, he was a poker player. He was successful because although to begin with his opponents held the best hands, they were cowardly and lacking in nerve, and they were frightened to call his bluff. Hitler was a psychologist who also liked a gamble. After 1941, the gambling became crazier and his luck ran out. Basically he forced his opponents to call his bluff - they had no other option.
Re the lottery, if I bought a ticket every week for 20 years, I would still have very little chance of winning. But it would be very good luck for the company running the lottery. They would have £1040 of mine.
What does this teach us? In life we have to gamble on something we believe in will happen and work towards it to get it, like a business venture or a dream.
About the lottery you won't stand any chance of winning it if you don't buy the ticket but you MIGHT win it if you do.
Hi Maria
Maybe I should open a lottery company. I’d win every time!
Yes, very often successful people are driven or obsessed by one thing. But it’s nice to have other interests too, like Einstein with his music or Newton with his bible, and of course you know about Leonardo.
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