amyjonestest / Oct 09 2015 16.46
We were an hour into the flight from Gatwick to Malaga when it happened. Turbulence of the kind that makes the seatbelt signs flash, overhead lockers judder, cabin crew strap in, and passengers exchange grimaces. There were five of us – my sister and I plus three girlfriends, bound for a week on the Costa Tropicale. We had waxed our bikini lines but we had not prepared for this.
What happened first? The feeling of dropping out of the sky as though we were aboard a stone rather than a plane? The pilot’s voice, eerily calm, announcing: “This is an emergency, this is an …” before cutting out? The oxygen masks dropping, a moment as horrifying as you always imagined it would be? Or rather tried not to imagine, ever, especially while cruising at 30,000ft.
We were told something about “engine failure” and a return to Gatwick to make an emergency landing. I became convinced my oxygen mask wasn’t working and spent what I deemed to be my last precious minutes on earth arsing around with the instructions. My sister grabbed a flight attendant patrolling the aisles with an enormous canister of oxygen, sucked hard on it, then asked her if we were going to die. (She refused to answer but I saw the fear in her eyes.) Another attendant was doling out what I thought were shots of tequila in a fabulously Bette Davis-ish screw-you to death and the tyranny of the overpriced minibar. It turned out they were very tiny glasses of water. I watched an elderly couple hold hands across the aisle. I thought my legs were going to explode.
Fifteen minutes later we were back at Gatwick, met by a welcome committee of paramedics and “special buses”. We were whisked off to a dystopian airport hotel to recuperate, collect tokens for complimentary tea or coffee, and witness the unravelling of our fellow passengers. So this was the life we had feared losing … God, it was crap (and beautiful). That night we flew out to Malaga as planned, defiant and terrified. My legs still felt like they were exploding and for years afterwards I would walk on to a plane and they would erupt all over again. But we were determined to have our holi
