I received an email from a friend of mine this afternoon after a rather wild attempted landing at Hong Kong (VHHH). Gotta love that inflight Internet access, no?
I am currently typing this at 29000 feet, 804km/h, sitting in row57h on an A330. We took off from Taipei .. got to Hong Kong and was put in two holding patterns with 4 circuits each then we start the approach in to the airport …. Mate I have never been thrown around like we were !!
The plane was like out of control …sliding and buffering and then lurching ….crazy !!!!
The wheels went down … I held my breath …. We were all over the place … I couldn’t see anything as the fog was so low.
Then out of nowhere in the middle of a lurch to the left a wheel hit the ground and then we had full power come on and we went hard up and took off straight away !!
So now were are on our way to Taipei again to refuel and then come back ….. but now the captain has told us we don’t have the fuel to get there so we are going to a smaller airport closer called Kaohsiung. We are to refuel there and then head back to Hong Kong
That’s certainly worse than my scariest landing which was going into Boston (KBOS) on a dark & stormy evening, rocking & rolling all over the place. Looking out the window at gray water then gray sky, engines spooling up and down – woo hoo – quite the ride. At least on my flight we made it down and didn’t need a go-around (all be it we touched down with a very positive return to earth).
