I’ve written about the scariest in-flight experience I have ever had, but I think last night may have been even worse. I’m still trying to process how much was reality and how much was nightmare.
I was on a redeye from Los Angeles to Chicago and had nodded off to sleep using my new sure-fire sleep method: an audio book on my phone. I must have been dozing for two hours when all of a sudden the plane began to violently shake and rapidly lose altitude.
I was jolted awake and grabbed onto the arm rests for support. It felt like we were on a roller coaster…going down. I recall what felt like a 45º angle and more than 20 seconds of precipitous drop. Drinks flew through the cabin and the captain urgently admonished all FAs to take their seats. It felt like the captain had lost control of the plane. My heart was beating rapidly and I thought that this was it…
We leveled out, but the shaking continued for several minutes. We were nearing Chicago and the FAs immediately concluded service. The plane continued to jolt though we ultimately made a perfectly smooth landing at ORD.
I pulled up the Flight Track Log on Flight Aware to examine the altitude and it does seem like my mind was playing tricks on me, at least in terms of whether the plane rapidly lost altitude. The incident did occur while passing through this weather system over Kansas/Nebraska:
So my guess is that I had a nightmare/hallucination of some kind. My goodness it was a scary one, though — I’ve never had anything like that. Have you ever had a bad dream about crashing while on an airplane that you thought was real?
That same storm system has been tormenting us down here with severe weather/flooding since Sunday, and the weather guys have been describing it as unusually strong, so you probably just hit a patch of exceptionally bad turbulence. And you’re right, you probably juxtaposed a nightmare with the turbulence and your mind started playing tricks on you. I’ve not had that specific sequence of events happen to me, but it happens at home every now and then. I’ll have some strange dream about a fire, burglars banging on the windows, etc., I’ll hear some sound (usually the wind blowing an acorn or something on the roof) and jolt awake, and it takes a few minutes to re-convince myself that it was a dream.
Maybe even though we are frequent flyers (more than most) we still have the perception distortion that is caused by severe turbulence just like regular flyers. Or maybe you are just a scaredy-cat.
Glad you’re okay. Flew HKG-DFW a few weeks ago in J. I was sleeping GREAT in the lie-flat reverse herringbone seats. I had a dream that my plane had crashed in Oregon, I had survived, hitched a ride on a passing shuttle on the road near the crash-site. The shuttle was going over bumpy roads en route to the Portland airport. I woke up (in real life) to find myself on the plane, and going through light-chop…WEIRD!!!
Hi Matthew,
I’m a big fan of your blog! I’ve actually got a flight in UA BF from EWR-HNL coming up that I’m dreading because of what happened to you-I do a bit of writing for another aviation blog and it’s my first time in lie flats and I’m hoping to take some pics and a video of the takeoff/landing but I’m seriously worried about getting a surly flight crew (old sCO metal) or worse-booted for being an avgeek! At any rate, I wanted to share a scary experience I had that was all too real.
I was on a B6 flight BOS-FLL a few years back. We started our descent out over the Atlantic AR route along the Florida coast. At first, it was a completely normal descent, thrust down to idle and a gentle pitch down. A few seconds later, I looked out the window and the pilots popped out a touch of spoilers and the descent rate increased. A few seconds after that, the floor dropped out from underneath me and we nosed right over into a deeper pitch angle than I’ve felt in years and the spoilers came ALL the way out to FULL (as in landing spoilers) which isn’t possible with the autopilot still engaged on a320‘s to my knowledge) my wife looked at me and got worried since she knows I’m a huge avgeek and also a FORMER fearful flier (I got rid of my fear by soaking up as much knowledge as possible of how everything works from brake release to touchdown and then some.) My ears popped like crazy almost to the point of pain and I had a white knuckle grip on the armrests which REALLY worried my wife since she’s seen me grin like a Cheshire Cat during turbulence and other “normal” but bumpy situations that would perhaps cause concern among infrequent fliers. Both the descent and level off were marked by increased g’s-far more than a normal takeoff/descent/level off!
I forgot to ask the pilots after the flight what was up with the descent-whether Miami center “slam dunked” us from the arrival onto the approach for traffic concerns or more importantly if they had gotten a TCAS resolution advisory (a RESOLUTION advisory is an audible warning of IMPENDING collision that’ll tell the pilots CLIMB CLIMB or DESCEND DESCEND-check out YouTube there’s likely videos) but when I pulled up the Flightaware data-it showed our rate of descent as -6548FPM which is REALLY unheard of. I asked a few pilot friends a while after the fact and they confirmed that -6500 from was WAY too much-that we likely got slam dunked by a novice MIA CTR controller and finally that the rate of descent was probably closer to 3500-4000FPM.
All in all, it’s a scary experience when you’re strapped in a tube that feels like it’s literally “falling” out of the sky at an abnormal rate. It was the first time I’d been really nervous on a flight since conquering my fear and an experience I won’t forget.
Yeah, I get lucid nightmares about crashing when I’m exceptionally exhausted napping at home. Never feared on planes tho.
I was on an AA 787 from DFW to EZE. I was fast asleep over Peru, both coming and going and for the first time ever had a dream about crashing…it was so odd and a bit frightening.
I was heading to London less than six months from the 9/11 incident on a Continental flight. As we started to near Ireland, and we might have in fact been flying over Ireland at this point though I am not 100% sure, the plane began suddenly to shake really hard, enough to bruise my sides. It didn’t help that I had plenty of room in the seat, but I had never been shaken so hard before. Then as it was shaking, I suddenly felt myself dropping, as if the plane were falling from the sky. This strong sense of falling went on for what seemed like forever, though I can’t really judge how long the dropping incident occurred because I didn’t really clock it at the time, and my emotional memory takes over at this point. Then we had the captain talking through the intercom asking all flight attendants to find seats. An FA trying to get to her seat fell down to the ground, and she started crawling to the FA area on the floor. At this point, the oxygen masks deployed. Almost everyone on the flight had a panicked look, and I began to frantically grab at my mask so I could put it on, and just as I was pulling it up to my face, everything seemed to normalize. Suddenly everything was ok, and the entire flight crew acted as if nothing had happened, even the FA that fell to the ground just went about the inflight service. I was scared to death though… for the rest of the flight, I was gripping the seat handles and putting my feet up against the chair in front of me, and praying silently that we would all arrive alive and in one piece.
At the time I was sure I would never fly again, but to my credit I did not develop a long-term fear of flying. I took an Air New Zealand flight to New Zealand only a few weeks after my London trip, and I didn’t feel frightened. I took it as a fluke, and I am glad to say I’ve never had any such experience again.