Monday, February 19, 2007

Debut flight journey

Feb 12, 2007 marked my flight debut journey. It took me two bitter experiences to inculcate the needed time-sense to catch a flight. My earlier attempts to board a flight once to Vijayawada, and the other to Tirupati failed for I couldn't reach the airport before the no-show threshold time. Such a tough skin that I am, may be I then thought I could board a flight just as if I could board a moving bus or moving train. Anyway, past is past, no regrets. Let me get down to narrate my first flight experience.
* * *
Flight slowly positioned itself at one end of the run-way. As the turbines rotated at an increasing speed, the flight began to speed at a few hundred kilometers per hour velocity on the run-way. For me sitting inside with the seat belt fastened, I could feel the thrust of the seat on my back very similar to the way one would feel when a roller coaster ride begins. As I savoured that speeding experience, in a moment the flight left the ground contact and I began to see things going below my eye level, similar to the experience when I travelled in a glass walled elevator. Very soon, buildings seem to dwindle to tiny boxes, roads to lines, residential layouts and fields become visible only as tiny patches on a vast canvas. While I made a futile effort to site any known building from such an altitude some white hazy substance blurred the view. I wondered what it was, to only find that the flight is cutting past a cloud. wooow! the very thought that I'm flying amidst clouds thrilled me. The cloud drifted by and once again I had a chance to spot objects on earth surface. But this time objects became even too small to make out anything of them. Cloud after cloud drifted past, as the plane ascended to greater heights. By the time the crew announced that take-off phase is over, I could only view from my window a vast sea of clouds, white milky ones stretched till horizon in all directions. It was a fabulous experience, an experience I would cherish for a long time to come.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home