FASTEN YOUR SEAT-BELTS

Some Air-travel Snippets
I suppose that, in ways, one of my most significant air encounters was actually on the ground. The EBRD annual meeting was in St. Petersburg and I booked myself and my Minister, Bertie Ahern, on Aeroflot, the Russian Airline. Well, Aer Lingus didn't have direct flights to there then and still may not have for all I know.

Serious Hell broke out when the Minister's Office copped on to this. The Minister was immediately rebooked onto a "more reliable airline". I knew that Aeroflot internal flights were crashing all over the place but had been assured that international Aerflot was up to international standards.

Anyway I held my own booking on Aeroflot and, after meeting a most interesting Russian lady mathematics professor on the flight, landed safely.

Bertie had a different problem on the ground in St. Petersburg and in Dublin during the meeting.

You can read about it here.

I have to admit to getting a fright on the way home.

There I was in my seat on the plane which was waiting to taxi when the hostess announced that we would be landing in Helsinki in half an hour or an hour or something. As I was going to London and not Helsinki I went straight into panic mode. Out of my seat, up to the lady to inform her I had got on the wrong plane.

I couldn't figure out how that happened but it does sometimes.

Imagine my relief when she told me that we were simply touching down in Helsinki on our flight to London.

Now I said it does happen, and I happen to have personal experience of this.

For about a year, I used to fly regularly to London for meetings of the EBRD Board of Directors.

One time, I was sitting in the plane on the Dublin tarmac waiting to taxi when I struck up conversation with an elderly lady sitting beside me. She told me she was flying over for her daughter's wedding.

"And where in London is your daughter living and getting married?"

"Oh no, she's not getting married in London, she's getting married in Manchester"

"And you're flying to London"

"No, I'm flying to Manchester"

So I called the hostess and the lady was sorted, fortunately before we got the call to begin taxiing.

Another time I was flying, I think, to Budapest and had a chat with a guy who was flying over from London to tune Beethoven's piano, which was to be on display in some celebration/commemoration or other.

You can read about my Budapest adventures here.

Yet another time on the approach to London Heathrow, I saw the same carpark twice from the same low height. On my way off the plane I asked the hostess to compliment the captain on his second approach. She looked a bit startled.

By far the most significant meeting I had on a plane was with Hywel Morris. I was on my way to spend some time with a Welsh-speaking family on a farm at Llwynpiod, near Tregaron in mid-Wales. Hywel worked in RTÉ in the design department.

He persuaded me to come along and look in on the Dublin Welsh Male Voice Choir when I got back. The choir rehearsed in Mr.Quinn's Central Bar in Aungier St.

That was the start of a brief career with the choir in which I ended up singing three of the four parts - not simultaneously - I graduated from top tenor through second tenor and then to my true home, baritone.

I suppose my most unusual flight was being the only passenger on the larger Government jet coming home from Luxembourg after an ECOFIN meeting.

I had been abandoned at the meeting at around 6pm by Bertie and Seán Cromien, and it was looking like I wasn't going to get home that night. There were no direct flights from Luxembourg so I'd have to go through Paris or London and it was getting very late by the time the meeting ended.

Then an angel came along in the person of Pat Hastings, the Department's representative at our Mission to the EU. Pat told me that Joe Walsh, then Minister for Agriculture, had come out in the jet and the plane was going home empty.

He arranged with the Ambassador for me to be taken to the airport in the Ambassador's car in time to catch the plane. I was driven right up to the steps of the plane, was saluted as I boarded and had a magnificent meal on the way home to Baldonnell.

I was a bit mean and decided to ring Seán from the plane to report on the outcome of the meeting, half hoping I'd get him out of bed in revenge for leaving me to make my own way home.

I also rang home, to tell them I'd be home after all, and I spoke to my sons and told them I was flying at 50K feet or something and it was -50 degrees outside. I gather they got some mileage out of that in school the following morning.

I wonder did the flight crew think I was a Minister. I was certainly treated like one.

I'll finish with my most challenging flight ever.

I should explain that when it comes to planes, I was terrified of flying. This arose out of my first flight ever in 1960 when I suddently realised, as the plane sheddered down the runway, that it was heavier than air, just like the No.47A bus, and was unlikely to leave the ground.

Well, against my expectations it did, and eventually rose to quite a height.

That was when I made my mistake. I looked out the window expecting to see the land rushing by underneath. But it wasn't. It was just there, stopped.

My brain immediately told me that if it was stopped, the plane was stopped, and as the plane required significant forward motion to stay in the air, my brain, in an instant, now prepared my body for the great fall to the ground and oblivion.

Though that didn't happen, as you will have gathered from my presence here, that moment never left me. From then on I was terrified of flying but did a lot of it in the course of my work, sometimes waking up sweating in the bed up to a week in advance of the flight.

So you can probably understand how I became a backseat driver on all my subsequent flights. I can, for example tell you when we're over Liverpool on the way to Brussels, without looking out the window or consulting watch or map. I simply got to know that the plane did a wee bank over Liverpool, and of course that in turn reassured me that we were on course.

Well, on one very cold and icy day, I was on a plane approaching Brussels. We had just begun our descent which would mean about fifteen minutes to landing.

So far so good. On course, on time, everything dandy. But as the time passed and the pilot maintained his fairly steep rate of descent for longer than I expected, I began to get a bit nervous. I became convinced that the outside controls had frozen over and that the pilot was no longer able to pull us out of our diving descent.

Once again oblivion beckoned. My nerves were at breaking point, but I didn't pray. This reassured me that my unbelief was total, sincere and well embedded. Little consolation in the circumstances but better than nothing.

Then, suddenly, there was this enormously loud sound of what seemed like us crashing and the plane decompressing all in one short moment.

And despite the shock, and me not yet dead, I didn't pray.

Well the reassurance this time lasted as what I had heard was some sort of coffee machine at the back of the plane imitating a pressure cooker at its moment of truth, and shortly afterwards the pilot gently pulled out of the dive and we landed safely.

So, the moral of the story?

Well, flying can be interesting, stressful and reassuring and, at the same time, good training for the final end of life experience.