In all my years of flying today was an airport landing first!
Vanessa and I left Phuket, Thailand for a quick 45 minute flight over to the island of Ko Samui. It’s a decent sized international airport and the airport takes in many flights a day.
First photo of Ko Samui as we were coming in for what we thought was our only landing.
As we were going in to land, I could see the runway from the window and we were very close to touching down. It looked like we were coming in fast and not slowing down as much normal. We never touched down on the runway and all of a sudden the pilot jerks the nose of the plane up and we are going up in the air again.
Vanessa turns to me and ask, “are we taking off again?” I respond that it looks like it and we climb pretty straight up.
Odd…yes. It made me think of the movie “Air Force One” where the pilot tries to land the plane and immediately take off again.
So as we are up in the air, with a lot of turbulence, the pilot doesn’t make any announcements for about 8 minutes and no one I talking. I can see we are starting to circle and just assumed the pilot took the entry too fast or something. Finally he comes on the loudspeaker and we understand it was heavy winds and he couldn’t land safely. He said we would circle for 10 minutes and then try to land again.
Another view of Ko Samui as we were circling for 10 minutes after first failed landing
So 10 minutes passes, and we go in for our second landing. This time we touch down and bounce up in the air off the runway. The pilot takes us back in the air. It’s not a huge runway so I you can’t land, there isn’t much more runway to try.
After two landing attempts, the pilot comes on and says the winds are too strong to land and we are returning to Phuket. There are about 60 people in our flight so I’m sure more disappointment like us.
The final picture of Ko Samui as the pilot decided to fly back to Phuket
Its been a lovely two hour “air tour” of some of the Thailand islands So far (and hopefully we will go back aoon).
I guess we are going to miss our 12:30 ferry to Ko Phangnan and car service to our resort…but at least we are safe and didn’t make a crash landing. There always is a silver lining. So now we are sitting at the airport in Phuket, waiting to find out if we will take off today or tomorrow. We have been good travelers and called our ferry, hotel and car service (so thankful that Vanessa has a local cell phone as it was much easier to do this quickly).
So, time to catch up on my blog, laugh about this experience and get ready for the next adventure…