PS....

On Sunday morning Clemency and I flew home early, catching the Air New Zealand ATR72 flight to Wellington at 7:40 am. About 20 minutes out of Wellington. there was a cockpit announcement that there was a"slight problem up front" and we were diverting to Palmerston North. I thought that the fact that we weren't going on to Wellington even though we were so close might indicate that the problem wasn't all that slight, but didn't say this to Clemency. The cabin crew quickly but quite calmly scooted through the plane with a big black plastic sack relieving people of their tea and coffee and belted themselves into their little fold out chairs.

We banked sharply over Palmerston North with the plane leaping about a bit in a moderately strong wind and the pilot plonked it onto the runway. Then came a cockpit announcement I'd never heard on a plane before, "Cabin Crew to your stations". One of the stewards told us to get up quickly and calmly and follow her off the plane and for us to stand upwind of it. The little swing down door opened faster than I've ever seen before, and like a row of goslings behind Mother Goose, we followed the steward out to stand in a little huddle on the tarmac, well away from the plane. It was only then I noticed our entourage: a group of vehicles with flashing lights. There were big yellow fire trucks and the red ones from the Fire Brigade. There were police cars. After a few minutes we were led off the tarmac and into the terminal. Some of the other passengers talked about smelling smoke, faintly at first but increasingly strongly as the flight progressed.

We were put on a flight to Christchurch, another ATR, around midday. Clemency quite inexplicably gave withering looks to my light hearted banter about fires, explosions and wings falling off and ignored me completely when I asked her if she had heard that noise - that metallic ripping sound? We got home a bit later than usual but we did get home. The news reports were muted. Air New Zealand said there had been an unusual odour which caused a diversion to one of its flights. I guess it was a pretty minor incident, but it did leave me with an even greater respect for Air New Zealand. The crew were superb in making their decisions, and in emptying a full plane in what could have been, for all they knew at the time, a very dangerous situation indeed, at speed and with not one hint of panic or anxiety.

Comments

David G King said…

I remember a flight over the Pacific in a 747 where we experienced the smell of hydraulic oil. Turns out there was a leak in the hydraulics for the front landing gear. They locked it in the forward positionAfter landing we had to wait at the end of the runway for a "tug" to come get us. That was the longest trip to the terminal I've ever experienced.

10 March 2014 at 11:22

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Return to Middle Earth

We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night. My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old

Available Light

Search This Blog