Now you have a safe flight, dear reader: We live in turbulent times - if it's just turbulence, thank your lucky stars

Yaniv Hayoun, the Israeli plumber - who kept his wits about him and reportedly grabbed the controls in the flydubai Flight 1073 cockpit, and started pulling back the handles 'the way he had seen on television shows' before off-duty relief pilots took over - inspired me to watch 'How to fly a plane' YouTube videos. You never know.

But it didn't last beyond a day. For one, the videos were boring. 'How to fly a Jet! Full lesson and cockpit view! Napa trip' had two blondes, Kinsey and Stephanie - the latter wearing a pair of magnificent black leather pants - exchanging a lot of flight jargon while flying a private jet that left me grounded. And the CGI-animation tutorial, 'How to fly plane step by step (B737)? Kitna aasan hai plane uraane?' while being more hands-on, was far less animating.

Also, I don't think I have what it takes to be a pilot. Or a plumber, for that matter. So, vigilant passenger I am stuck being.


Now, I don't have a fear of flying. But I do find flying tedious - not the actual flight, but what happens before and after on the ground. While turbulence doesn't rattle me much - and I never really think of hijackers or mid-air collisions - there was one occasion when, flying from Kanpur to Delhi, a sudden 'pop' sound from one of the engines, followed by a lurch-and-drop that lasted interminable minutes, made me wish there was Wi-Fi on board (something I'm dead against otherwise), so that I could tell my wife a final goodbye, and that I had forgotten to pay that month's electricity bill. (The plane was turned around to Kanpur less than 10 mins into the flight.)

But nothing has scared me about flying as much as Dmitry Suvorov's 2022 film, Odna (The One), I recently watched. It's based on a real event that happened on August 24, 1981, when Aeroflot Flight 811 hit a Soviet Air Force Tupolev Tu-16K bomber. Only one person - 20-yr-old Larisa Savitskaya - miraculously survived the 5 km drop into the birch forests of the Russian Taiga.

Over an astoundingly stressful, unbroken 2 min 34 sec sequence, we witness (read: experience) a passenger plane disintegrating in terrifying detail. From the moment, Larisa (played by Nadezhda Kaleganova) is jolted awake 8 minutes into the movie by what seems to be turbulence, we inhabit her perspective through the camera(s). A few seconds later, Larisa/we see the cabin decompress, and three people being sucked out at 16,400 ft over the USSR right before her/our eyes.

Larisa, thrown against the roof of the plane, and then 'dragged' down the aisle as the plane spins while it nosedives and disintegrates further (taking her newly-wed husband in one chunk), is far scarier than any contortionist callisthenics in any exorcism movie. The astounding cinematography of Mikhail Kelim is too hyper-real for cinematic comfort.

The most horrific part has to be when we see the ground hurtling towards us at terrifying speed through the gaping hole directly below us, Larisa/us somehow having strapped ourselves to a detached piece of fuselage. The metal tube we're in is spinning, as we can see tree tops 'above' and sky 'below'.

When the sequence ended with Larisa in her crushed can crashing into the trees, I had to pause the film and go and wash my face. I sincerely hope 3D-viewing of Odna is illegal.

So, yes, even as Yaniv Hayoun, the plumber hero in a plunging plane, redeems my trust in human ingenuity and instinct, it's these words from Stephen King's introduction to the anthology, Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales, that I turn to for in-flight reading from time to time:

'Once your tube of metal and plastic is sealed up (like - gulp! - a coffin) and leaving the runway, trailing its dwindling shadow behind it, only one thing is sure, a thing so positive it is beyond statistics: you will come down. Gravity demands it. The only question is where and why and in how many pieces, one being the ideal.'

It's weirdly reassuring. Wishing you a safe flight.