St Lucia July 2022

[Barry]

Wow - that was indeed frightening!

I can't match that, but I have flown in a twin engined Cessna. I had flown in to Botswana from Windhoek, Namibia on a conventionial jet plane, landed and went through passport control to wait in the passenger lounge, armed only with my travel documents to fly to the Okovango Delta in Botswana. After a while of waiting around, a very smartly dressed official asked if I needed help. I explained who I was and what I was waiting for. "Ah yes, we know about you. Your pilot will be along in a few moments". And true enough, a tall Australian wearing shorts, T-shirt and what looked like flip-flops, sidled up and said "Hi, my name is Bruce, you must be Barry - where are we going?" (!). I told him where we were going and he punched in the information into what I presume was a navigational aid, and we took off. Being able to fly low, and sitting next to him I was able to look down to see the wildlife and natural features of Botswana.

We landed on an airstrip near a river, disembarked (I only had a small bag with me) and Bruce told me to wait "over there", whilst he went off to complete the necessary paperwork. After a few moments a Pygmy appeared out of the bushes, introduced himself to me as Daniel and said "Your dugout canoe is over here, I will escort you to the camp". And so we did. Daniel was my local guide for all the on-foot safaris we did over the next few days. Of course all of the above had been arranged in advance, but was a surprise to see it all expedited in such a relaxed manner.



The only potential dangerous incident which occured was on a flight from London to China, via Karachi. We were coming into land at Karachi and getting close to the runway, when all of sudden the plane abruptly took off like a rocket and circled around a few times. When we did eventually land (and not that smoothly), I asked my fellow passengers if they knew what had happened. A couple sat near the wing said they did not hear the landing gear go down; and another couple said that they had had a bad premonition about the flight before boarding, but it was now over. Obviously the pilot had tried to land and the engineer had told him the landing gear had not been engaged! It must have too late to engage it so the pilot had only the one option.

Apropos the flight in a cargo helicopter - well that was in Laos, an internal flight from Vientiane to Luang Prabang. We we all seated in the hold of a Soviet cargo helicopter: mothers nursing babies, baskets of food, caged chickens, the fuel tank(!) and me. I was told that it would be noisy, so was armed with ear plugs, but as it turned out it wasn't noisy at all, so didn't use them. Being sat in the hold there were no large windows, so couldn't really see where we were flying. After a while I thought the journey was taking longer than expected, but we did eventually land. Disembarked and thought "this looks familiar". Turns out the pilot could not land at Luang Prabang due to mist/fog, and could only turn back. After an hour we took off again and landed safely, only to be told that a similar flight a week previously had crashed!