No journey
At last I did not make it to Brussels.
Believe or not, I decided to cancel it in the very last minute, literally speaking already after boarding, with my belt fastened in the seat.
After we finished boarding we have been waiting for getting ready to take off when a complete blackout came. Everything stopped, the engines too. It was quite surprising - I've been flying more or less frequently but it never happened before to any aircrafts of any of the air companies that I flew.
I thought "hmm, okay, one occasion is still not the end of the world", but of course I became nervous, however trying to keep myself cool. Then an engineer came up on board and was consulting the pilot. They restarted the machine in a few minutes and everything seemed to be just fine. Then 3 minutes later everything stopped again. The two stewards came out of the cockpit and I managed to catch the wondering clueless glimps that they exchanged. Already then I had some very very bad feelings about the whole thing and by the second blackout it became very strong.
It was more than just fear - I was absolutely sure that if I stayed in the aircraft and took off with it, something very bad would have happened to me.
I felt it once in my life before, when I was around 18 and helped a stranger to find his way, but I escaped because I felt something very bad. Later it turned out that he wanted to knife me.
Anyway, back to the aircraft. I told Cs. that we need to get off the plane before it's too late and he was just smiling and tried to convince me that everything would be fine. After however the second rebooting he agreed - later he told me he has never seen me like this before so he thought maybe now he should listen to me. The money that we paid for the ticket was not too much anyway as it was a discount flight, so we said "fuck the money". So I went to the steward and asked him what was going on. "There was nothing special" he said "just that the system required a restart, you know, like in case of computers". Bummer. He told it to the wrong person. I said, "okay, then we would like to get off". He asked if we were sure and I said "definitely". So they asked for a bus and took us back to the airport.
Before getting off I did not look back at the other passengers but I am sure we made a few of them thinking a bit. But we tried to keep everything as calm as possible.
Anyway as soon as we got out of the building of the airport I started calming down and summarized the whole thing. What I felt definitely was more than just my basic fear of flying, it was a well founded something that I felt.
I was very sorry for poor Cs. that I screwed up his weekend holiday, in the same time he was absolutely understanding and he said he had no problems with it because he saw that there was really something wrong. He also said that while I was talking to the steward, there was one more blackout but I already did not recognize that one, I might have been so much "revved". He also said that while we have been boarding, he saw that the cockpit's floor was full of fallen apart papers and noone took the effort to collect them. It's not a big deal but it speaks for the negligence of the crew.
Anyway, after getting home, we checked the website of the airport and were quite surprised to see that the plane still have not taken off, and it was already 1 hour after the expected take-off time. We kept checking the site continuously and the delay became longer and longer each time we checked. At last it took off with almost 4 hours of delay - probably they have been fixing the problem for so long or waiting for another aircraft to arrive and take the passengers. So there was really something wrong with it. In the same time if they would have offered another aircraft to go with that, that would have been absolutely okay with me. But I knew that our current aircraft completely sucked for some unknown reason.
In addition it turned out that 2 hours after we left the airport, the main terminal was closed because of bomb-scare. They serached through everyone, even the pilots.
Actually in the past 3 weeks various minor problems came up which you would most probably call "bad luck", but there were many of these. And in the last 24 hours prior to departure I got a a few news of and about death as well.
Thinking back now I think I may have been simply silly and afraid to much - but it's also true that this was the second time in my life when I felt and knew that something very bad would happen. However I will never know what would have happened if I stayed on-board.
I am just very sorry that I could not attend Thomas' seminar this time, so probably I will have to go and visit him sometime next year.
This year I need to go to Japan once more - and I have no major problem with flying there again - and I also want to take Cs. to Egypt. We agreed before anyway to go there this year if we can make it financially, as it'll be our 10th anniversary just when I will be in Japan.
I also want to compensate him for this misery - I know he has been preparing for this trip to Brussels very much - he has not been out of Hungary since 2002. He is a great person indeed.
Believe or not, I decided to cancel it in the very last minute, literally speaking already after boarding, with my belt fastened in the seat.
After we finished boarding we have been waiting for getting ready to take off when a complete blackout came. Everything stopped, the engines too. It was quite surprising - I've been flying more or less frequently but it never happened before to any aircrafts of any of the air companies that I flew.
I thought "hmm, okay, one occasion is still not the end of the world", but of course I became nervous, however trying to keep myself cool. Then an engineer came up on board and was consulting the pilot. They restarted the machine in a few minutes and everything seemed to be just fine. Then 3 minutes later everything stopped again. The two stewards came out of the cockpit and I managed to catch the wondering clueless glimps that they exchanged. Already then I had some very very bad feelings about the whole thing and by the second blackout it became very strong.
It was more than just fear - I was absolutely sure that if I stayed in the aircraft and took off with it, something very bad would have happened to me.
I felt it once in my life before, when I was around 18 and helped a stranger to find his way, but I escaped because I felt something very bad. Later it turned out that he wanted to knife me.
Anyway, back to the aircraft. I told Cs. that we need to get off the plane before it's too late and he was just smiling and tried to convince me that everything would be fine. After however the second rebooting he agreed - later he told me he has never seen me like this before so he thought maybe now he should listen to me. The money that we paid for the ticket was not too much anyway as it was a discount flight, so we said "fuck the money". So I went to the steward and asked him what was going on. "There was nothing special" he said "just that the system required a restart, you know, like in case of computers". Bummer. He told it to the wrong person. I said, "okay, then we would like to get off". He asked if we were sure and I said "definitely". So they asked for a bus and took us back to the airport.
Before getting off I did not look back at the other passengers but I am sure we made a few of them thinking a bit. But we tried to keep everything as calm as possible.
Anyway as soon as we got out of the building of the airport I started calming down and summarized the whole thing. What I felt definitely was more than just my basic fear of flying, it was a well founded something that I felt.
I was very sorry for poor Cs. that I screwed up his weekend holiday, in the same time he was absolutely understanding and he said he had no problems with it because he saw that there was really something wrong. He also said that while I was talking to the steward, there was one more blackout but I already did not recognize that one, I might have been so much "revved". He also said that while we have been boarding, he saw that the cockpit's floor was full of fallen apart papers and noone took the effort to collect them. It's not a big deal but it speaks for the negligence of the crew.
Anyway, after getting home, we checked the website of the airport and were quite surprised to see that the plane still have not taken off, and it was already 1 hour after the expected take-off time. We kept checking the site continuously and the delay became longer and longer each time we checked. At last it took off with almost 4 hours of delay - probably they have been fixing the problem for so long or waiting for another aircraft to arrive and take the passengers. So there was really something wrong with it. In the same time if they would have offered another aircraft to go with that, that would have been absolutely okay with me. But I knew that our current aircraft completely sucked for some unknown reason.
In addition it turned out that 2 hours after we left the airport, the main terminal was closed because of bomb-scare. They serached through everyone, even the pilots.
Actually in the past 3 weeks various minor problems came up which you would most probably call "bad luck", but there were many of these. And in the last 24 hours prior to departure I got a a few news of and about death as well.
Thinking back now I think I may have been simply silly and afraid to much - but it's also true that this was the second time in my life when I felt and knew that something very bad would happen. However I will never know what would have happened if I stayed on-board.
I am just very sorry that I could not attend Thomas' seminar this time, so probably I will have to go and visit him sometime next year.
This year I need to go to Japan once more - and I have no major problem with flying there again - and I also want to take Cs. to Egypt. We agreed before anyway to go there this year if we can make it financially, as it'll be our 10th anniversary just when I will be in Japan.
I also want to compensate him for this misery - I know he has been preparing for this trip to Brussels very much - he has not been out of Hungary since 2002. He is a great person indeed.
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