36000ft From Safety

A normal day.... hopefully

Only God knows how much I had waited for this day. My wife and I were about to board a plane to Vitoria Falls for a nice kid-free vacation. It was a funny feeling to board a plane without you having to fly it – not to brag but I was the most experienced captain of NJM Airways with an astonishing 20 years under my belt.

The only difference this time was that instead of NJM Airways, it was Qatar Airways and instead of me in the cockpit, I was just a regular passenger. Well at least I was in first class. Of course I had done this before but never with my significant other. It was quite a personal milestone and a definite tick off my bucket-list.

We boarded what was a brand new looking Boeing 747 – of course during my silver laden career I had seen better, but I couldn’t complain. We took our respective seats and patiently waited for the plane to take off.

As I looked outside I smiled to myself as I saw clouds gather in the sky and as I looked back to my wife, Jane, it was as if she read my mind “I told you to bring umbrellas but nooo, you never listen to me” she said but I simply kissed her on the forehead – that always works and it did.

After a while all the seat were filled and due to the setting sun it was growing dark inside but it was momentarily wiped out by a blinding flash of lightning which was immediately followed by a deafening roar of thunder and inevitably rain droplets which was notably to the satisfaction of my wife.

And there it was the P.A system and from my experience I could instantly tell that the confident bass voice was the captain’s and sure enough it was. “Attention passengers, this is

Mr. Ncube, your captain speaking. We apologize for the takeoff delay due to the sudden bad weather but please note that we will now be taking off shortly. Please remain seated and enjoy your one way flight from Paris to Victoria Falls.

Jane clutched my hand as the jet sped along the runway and as we soared into the rain-filled French skies. It was an 8 hour scheduled flight so it was going to get very boring seating in one seat, so naturally I dosed off.Everything after that happened very very fast. Very very fast indeed....