I had this dream of flying an airliner with passengers as trainee / co-pilot. Ironically, my captain is someone I knew during high school years, a close friend. Although he's not a pilot in real life.
It was a nice dream at first. I always wanted to be a pilot, I just never had the opportunity and the strength to beat my circumstances in real life so the dream somehow gave me the opportunity how it felt like. True enough, it felt great.
So there we are on "final" approach to the landing, just several miles from touchdown at the airport. Plane configured for landing and slowly descending. But somehow, I ended up sitting on the captain's seat on the left and we had this long casual talk with m captain friend on the co-pilot's seat. We got distracted and didn't realize the plane had leveled off and stopped descending. Only just a mile away from the edge of the runway, we both realized the plane is now too high to land safely and now have to go around and attempt another landing.
But my captain friend decided instead to dive the plane to rapidly lose altitude to attempt a landing. But as soon as my friend did it, he froze in his seat. The look of terror in his face. With the plane now diving towards the ground from such a low altitude, it seemed like we are doing to crash and to make it worse, the controls are responding weakly to my input, giving me that feeling of absolute terror since were only couple of seconds from impacting the ground so I shouted at my friend to set all throttles to maximum. hoping the increased speed would make the plane respond stronger to control inputs and it did.
I was able to pull up and narrowly avoided a nose-first high speed impact with the ground but we're still descending and figured I had no choice but to terminate the descent right the edge of the runway but now I'm faced with a new problem. The runway is severely uneven, not flat at all! There are steep hills going up and down the runway! And now I'm the one panicking! But my friend captain who finally snapped out of his frozen state told me, he had landed on that runway many times and there's no need to worry. He just told me to land the plane now and not worry about bouncing off due to the unevenness and thankfully, we landed without further problems.
The feeling of getting out of that ordeal alive and unhurt was that of total excitement. Although it was a dream, the emotions felt so real. We realized at that moment we're shouting our final words, the last few seconds of our life if we end up crashing!
We were met by our angry airline boss telling how we put everyone in grave danger but on top of it, broke the record for making the shortest stop on the runway on that aircraft model and asked us if we're interested in becoming C-130 pilots for the marines in sarcasm and anger since they love landing in short distances like we just did, unplanned and almost crashing. Fortunately, we kept our jobs. The plane wasn't damaged. The G-force limits aren't exceeded and we touched down rather softly.
It did feel like I couldn't breathe in fear when the plane dived and when I tried to pull the stick all the way back, the plane was responding weakly to the controls and at that point, I thought that was it. We're dead but thankfully, the plane picked up enough speed with the throttles at full, I was able to level off the plane just a few feet off the ground. If we're delayed just a few seconds more we would have likely crashed.
It's a feeling of insane terror, dread, hopelessness. We did looked at each other, me and my friend and said "this is it". But it was a mood of celebration and happiness in the end for not dying that day and keeping our jobs.
It was a nice dream at first. I always wanted to be a pilot, I just never had the opportunity and the strength to beat my circumstances in real life so the dream somehow gave me the opportunity how it felt like. True enough, it felt great.
So there we are on "final" approach to the landing, just several miles from touchdown at the airport. Plane configured for landing and slowly descending. But somehow, I ended up sitting on the captain's seat on the left and we had this long casual talk with m captain friend on the co-pilot's seat. We got distracted and didn't realize the plane had leveled off and stopped descending. Only just a mile away from the edge of the runway, we both realized the plane is now too high to land safely and now have to go around and attempt another landing.
But my captain friend decided instead to dive the plane to rapidly lose altitude to attempt a landing. But as soon as my friend did it, he froze in his seat. The look of terror in his face. With the plane now diving towards the ground from such a low altitude, it seemed like we are doing to crash and to make it worse, the controls are responding weakly to my input, giving me that feeling of absolute terror since were only couple of seconds from impacting the ground so I shouted at my friend to set all throttles to maximum. hoping the increased speed would make the plane respond stronger to control inputs and it did.
I was able to pull up and narrowly avoided a nose-first high speed impact with the ground but we're still descending and figured I had no choice but to terminate the descent right the edge of the runway but now I'm faced with a new problem. The runway is severely uneven, not flat at all! There are steep hills going up and down the runway! And now I'm the one panicking! But my friend captain who finally snapped out of his frozen state told me, he had landed on that runway many times and there's no need to worry. He just told me to land the plane now and not worry about bouncing off due to the unevenness and thankfully, we landed without further problems.
The feeling of getting out of that ordeal alive and unhurt was that of total excitement. Although it was a dream, the emotions felt so real. We realized at that moment we're shouting our final words, the last few seconds of our life if we end up crashing!
We were met by our angry airline boss telling how we put everyone in grave danger but on top of it, broke the record for making the shortest stop on the runway on that aircraft model and asked us if we're interested in becoming C-130 pilots for the marines in sarcasm and anger since they love landing in short distances like we just did, unplanned and almost crashing. Fortunately, we kept our jobs. The plane wasn't damaged. The G-force limits aren't exceeded and we touched down rather softly.
It did feel like I couldn't breathe in fear when the plane dived and when I tried to pull the stick all the way back, the plane was responding weakly to the controls and at that point, I thought that was it. We're dead but thankfully, the plane picked up enough speed with the throttles at full, I was able to level off the plane just a few feet off the ground. If we're delayed just a few seconds more we would have likely crashed.
It's a feeling of insane terror, dread, hopelessness. We did looked at each other, me and my friend and said "this is it". But it was a mood of celebration and happiness in the end for not dying that day and keeping our jobs.
