I’m at a time in my life when all my friends seem to be getting married and with most of them having done very well for themselves financially, it almost seems to be a competition between them to see who can have the most lavish wedding. In the past few years I’ve been to one in a chateau in Luxembourg, another in a castle in Ireland, another on a beach on a Greek island and now this one; a beachside mansion in Antibes.

I’m really looking forward to it, as it’s not very often I get to see my best friends these days other than at their weddings. Most of them have spread out to different countries around the world and have even started families, so a good old knees-up somewhere nice will always go down a treat.

As ever, getting off my island to go anywhere is always a statistical nightmare, trying to tie in connecting flights, but me and the Mrs are now sitting on our 2^nd flight of the day as we start to approach the south coast of mainland Europe on what looks like a lovely sunny summer’s day.

I can feel that the throttles have been rolled back and we are starting to lose altitude, meaning we must be starting our descent into Nice on the French coast. The flight so far has been smooth and as we can see the Mediterranean Sea for the first time we can’t be too far away from landing.

The captain then comes on and calmy confirms that we are starting our approach to Nice and as normal advises us of the current weather conditions in Nice. It sounds lovely and sunny, just what we want for our few days away from home at our friend’s wedding, but he then mentions that if we look out the right side of the aircraft we can see the black clouds of a storm in the distance. Seconds later the aircraft just drops out of the sky. I mean, we’ve all encountered turbulence, but I’d never felt anything like this before. The thing just felt like there was suddenly nothing under the wings anymore and dropped like a brick. We were in freefall for seconds. People who didn’t have their seatbelts on were thrown out of their seats, hitting their heads on the ceiling and people started screaming. From freefall, the aircraft suddenly banged as it hit the air again, causing more screams. Then it fell again, like it was falling out of the sky. In front of me I could see more people being hurled up into the air out of their seats. Food, drink, laptops, anything that was loose at all was in the air. Then we hit another wall of air again, feeling like we’d crash landed a second time.

Thankfully we had our seatbelts on, but nevertheless, we were both petrified. We knew all too well what it was, we’re both well travelled, but we’d never felt anything like this before, it was terrifying. The Mrs is squeezing my hand and says “are we ok?” to which I know my only reply can be “yes of course, it’ll be over in a moment”. I was wrong.

Once again the aircraft dropped for another few seconds and then crashed into a further wall of air to the sound of more and more screams. It was like watching one of those disaster movies that you pray you’d never be on. But we were very much in this movie and it was just as horrible as you could imagine.

The plane fell again, more screams, more things thrown in the air and now, as if the blood-curdling screams weren’t already enough, the added sound of the engines having been put into full throttle make things sound even worse.

And now one of the flight attendant trollies has gone flying past. God only knows what’s happened to the flight attendant.

I could feel my hand getting gripped tighter and tighter with every squeeze, but I kept looking at the Mrs with as trusting an expression as I could possibly muster and repeated we’d be fine. But inside I was absolutely shitting myself too.

We drop again, freefall …….. then BANG as we hit the air. Then another drop and another bang. Everyone is screaming.

One more drop out of the sky and I take another hard look at the Mrs to reassure her one more time, but this time it’s different. Because this time I can feel the aircraft starting to veer off to the left. The whole plane is shaking, the engines are blaring at full speed, it’s banking off to one side and everyone is screaming. I look at her to say one last time “It’s fine”, but this is the first time I actually thought to myself, you know what, this ISN’T fine at all. My real thought was “he’s lost it” and we’re on the way down. In the flash of a moment I went to a very dark place in my life, where you suddenly wonder if you’ve told everyone you love them, if you’ve been a good person in your life and you pray that whatever is about to happen, that it’s over quick.

And like that, the plane stopped shaking.

It stopped falling out of the sky and people started to compose themselves, with just the sound of a baby crying in the distance. The plane rolled back to horizontal and the engines back to idle. A flight attendant ran past no doubt on the way to help someone less fortunate than ourselves.

The captain came on the tannoy and apologised for what had just happened, explaining that the storm in the distance must have caused a huge pocket of turbulence that wasn’t picked up by the aircraft warning system and that we should be landing in Nice in a few minutes. One of the flight attendants then came on, an Irish lady, I’ll never forget her voice. She explains that she will attend to anyone requiring medical attention as soon as she can and that emergency services will be waiting for us when we land. She also, in a way that only an Irish person could do, says that anyone who needs a stiff drink can have whatever they want, on the house, both now and when we get to Arrivals at the airport. Courtesy of British Airways. Her calm voice and sweet Irish accent sounded like the voice of an angel after the few terrifying minutes we had all just experienced a few minutes earlier.

Leaving the aircraft I thanked her for her amazing professionalism under those terrifying circumstances. She said in 25 years of service she’d never witnessed anything like that before.

Looking back now, not that logical thought is ever likely to make much of an appearance in your head when your flight seems to be nosediving into the ground with a cabin full of screaming people, it makes perfect sense that when an aircraft encounters bad turbulence it would increase engine speed to maximum to get out of there quick and also bank to one side in order to reduce altitude, but in that exact moment you’re more likely to think you’re going to die.

We walked out into arrivals and was met by some of our friends who had arrived earlier in the day. They ask immediately why everyone coming through the gate looked like they’d just seen a ghost.

Well ….. take me to the nearest bar and get me a stiff fucking drink and I’ll tell you aaaall about it.