Korrekturleserlesen: Black danger, high up in the air

[Schwindgasse]

Black danger, high up in the air

The alarm button was blinking red.
“The engine fails!”, were the next few words I heard. There was panic everywhere in the aircraft. Beside me the inexperienced co-pilot was panicing too. It seemed like he could hardly stand praying. It was an engine failure – the most dreaded incident which could happen in a pilot’s life, like mine was.

I looked out of the cockpit and noticed that my fears from a few minutes ago had come true. Our airplane had straightly flown into an ash cloud. Into the black ash cloud from the Icelandic vulcan Eyjafjallajökull! I should have listened to everyone’s suggest not to fly, but I had nevertheless flown – and now I had to assume responsibility for it. The plane was loosing high. Due to the fact that already my first try to contact the tower failed, I decided to handle everything on my own.
“Tell everyone to put on the oxygen mask and fasten his or her seat belt!”, I screamed; any stewardess must have heard it. I considered a plan and announced, “Switch off the engine, switch it completely off!” Nobody believed me, indeed, nobody wanted to. “Do it!” I shrieked loudly with a sign of anxiety in my voice. The vehicle abruptly seemed to fall down – more or less, it did. However, that exactly was my aim, also if I nearly felt dead. Unbelievably, everything works. I handled to alter course when we left the cloud and the first try to restart the engines performed, too. I breathed not only one sigh of relief, tried to stay conscious and returned the plane to its regular flight path.

As we later softly landed at the airport, in contrast to many minds that we had already been dead, I was glad to be back on solid ground. My experience with the ash cloud became famous. Some people even wanted to write a book about it, but I did not mind. I was just endlessly happy to be alive and thanked god for that fact, each day again.