Landing gears down

LH 400 hit an air pocket and dumped a few meters of altitude, in an otherwise uneventful journey. Scheduled to hit the runway at the average (landing) speed of 185 miles per hour, the Lufthansa aircraft took longer than usual and began to hover over the Atlantic swooping now to the left, now to the right and circling in a tight sphere. Apparently, there was some delay in clearing the runway for landing and the pilot was buying some time.

My window suddenly filled with a deep blue as the Airbus swooped to the left, I could see the milky waves lapping up the shores, the coastline running for miles bordering the vast reservoir of water. There are times in a long flight when one tends to think of unfortunate mid air incidents, especially when the pilot suddenly sounds a caution to passengers ‘advising’ them to wear their seatbelts as ‘we are expecting rough weather ahead.’ Images of all the plane crashes that you have seen on TV flood your mind and leave you praying to God (to the pilot if you are an atheist). But in this instance, the waters seemed strangely reassuring, maybe because they were so close by that even a fall did not seem to have bad effects…hell, in fact it might be fun to take a dip in the ocean too that way!

There were not many people on the beach the harsh winter’s cold was keeping people in their homes, but that didn’t keep me from clicking photographs from my cell phone till the time it ran out of memory. The left wing ran across the window as it dipped low and seemed to plunge into the waters, everyone was excited and I knew that the craze for New York was not for the desi alone, as I saw many Europeans crowd near windows to catch a glimpse of the city’s shoreline.

It was fun those few minutes when we all had an aerial tour of the bay region of New York City. I was grappling with my ambivalent feelings, wanting to land because of the thrill of being in the Big Apple, not wanting to, because I never know when I’d get to experience the joy of hovering over a vast ocean in a plane.

Finally, we left the bay; the plane descended rapidly, and touched down onto the tarmac of the John F Kennedy airport, in New York City. My first trip to a foreign nation had begun!