Fasten Your Seat Belts

Years ago I experienced a near miss on a Air France flight from Paris to Atlanta. When hearing about the crash of the American Airlines flight in Washington it brought back memories of my own experience years ago.

We had an uneventful flight until the last few minutes of the flight during the descent into Atlanta Hartsfield. I could feel the airplane going down when the airplane suddenly made a sharp turn up. As that happened, our two flight attendance ran down the aisle to the two jump seats and pulled down their four-point harness, one grabbing an emergency kit.

I had never seen that reaction before so I knew this was really serious. After a few minutes of flying straight up, the plane made a right turn and started to circle back. All was calm. The flight attendant got up and started up the aisle to the rear of the plane collecting trash and cups.

We landed in a few minutes with not a mention of the unusual occurrences. At this time we had no idea of the near miss.

When going though Customs, one of the agents commented, “Oh, y’all were on the flight that was the near miss.” She explained there was another plane on the runway we were assigned.

For the next week I checked the TSA website for near misses, no mention at all.

I can assure you this was the worse experience in all my years of flying and I had plenty of things happen.

I can only imagine the fear the travelers had on the flight that crashed last week. Hopefully their death was very quick.