The past midnight announcement at the Islamabad international airport on Saturday, June 26 informed the passengers at the departure lounge that a PIA flight scheduled for Lahore from Islamabad has been cancelled due to inclement weather.
My wife Nusrat Fatima and I had inadvertently arrived at the Islamabad International Airport aboard PIA flight PK-306 from Karachi that night because it could not land at Lahore due to a storm there and instead it got diverted to Islamabad. We could not then have imagined in our wildest thoughts that the diversion from Lahore to Islamabad was not as straightforward a matter as we had assumed. What transpired between Lahore and Islamabad we learnt through media reports days later.
A report on one of the private television channel's website said (translated from Urdu by this correspondent), "The Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane [the one we had been flying on] from Karachi to Lahore had to enter the Indian airspace because of bad weather.
"The PIA plane stayed in the Indian airspace for 10 minutes. Despite the fact that the direction of the plane changed, it could not land in Lahore."
Of course all the media reports did mention the crucial fact that permission had been sought from the Indian air traffic controller before entering their airspace, and that the plane entered the Indian airspace after having been granted permission.
When I read these reports out to my wife Nusrat, she made an interesting comment. She said, "Dushman Say Kaisi Ijazat Laina. Dushman To Dushman Hai [What is the worth of the permission from the enemy. An enemy is an enemy]."
So there we sat at the Islamabad International Airport that past Friday-Saturday midnight not knowing that as per the media reports we had flown in the Indian airspace for about 10 minutes before flight PK-306 touched down at the Islamabad International Airport. There was no way of knowing about that and of course there was no need for knowing that until later.
Nevertheless having been through a terrible storm had been an experience enough to have shaken us to our bare bones. We were still wondering if we could well deserve to designate ourselves as survivors. Rhetorically speaking I could say that we did survive what would have been ... well... an eventuality.
In the following paragraphs I shall attempt to describe how we felt when we hit the storm on board PK-306 on the night of Friday, June 25, past 23:00 hours.
With recollection from my memory I do vividly remember the Captain's announcement about descending into Lahore for landing. The announcement also said that it was raining in Lahore.
Soon after the announcement the descent began and so did the jerks sideways and the bumps and perhaps the air pockets. Those bumps were not any ordinary bumps that air travelers usually encounter.
Nusrat and I had flown to the Middle East, continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, Australia and North America in all seasons and weathers, but we had never ever experienced such a horrible weather before.
It was like part of a rollercoaster ride that night. We clasped each other's hands as tightly as we could and she leaned her head onto my chest and we held onto each other as if we would hold us back from sliding into an abyss.
I could hear her crying though it later turned out that actually the person crying was a young girl sitting in the row immediately behind that of ours. Nusrat had been relatively composed though. Nevertheless, she had full realization of the fact that things might turn uglier. She later told me that the thought uppermost on her mind was that how her siblings would do without her.
Those 20 minutes or so were the most agonizing moments of our entire travel history, collectively and individually. Those 20 minutes included the time we spent foraying into the Indian airspace.
Hypothetically speaking I wonder how I would have felt had I learnt in real-time about the foray into the Indian airspace. My heart must have missed several beats in dreadful anticipation of being shot down by the Indians any moment in an act of omission or commission.
Nusrat and I chatted about this and that to divert our minds from what was going on. We even burst into a laughter over something. Actually this was our coping strategy. This was the strategy to relief us of the excruciating stress we had been experiencing.
The tilts and bumps continued for a while. With my very rudimentary knowledge of aerodynamics, the biggest fear haunting me was the threat of the storm hurling the plane into a stall.
A while later we could feel that the plane had gained altitude and the flight became more levelled. By the way the public announcement system remained silent all that time.
I began chatting with my fellow traveler who had been sitting next to me on Seat Number 20C. We were sure that the flight had been diverted and landing at Lahore was an impossibility. We wondered where the diversion was meant for, and she guessed that we might be going to Sialkot.
Then came the public announcement by the Captain informing us that we were heading for Islamabad because the weather in Lahore was very bad and that he had tried his "level-best" to land the plane in Lahore but in vain.
Soon we saw the lights of Islamabad below us and thought that we had literally weathered the storm.
Just before landing at Islamabad International Airport a fellow passenger sitting in the row behind us switched on her mobile phone and began chatting with someone. I could not ignore her violating the protocol and told her to switch off her cell phone which she did.
Soon we landed at the Islamabad International Airport. I guess the landing time must have been around between 00:00 hours and 00:20 hours.
We were told to remain in the cabin until further announcement. I don't remember how long we stayed in the cabin before being told to disembark.
The time then must have been 01:00 hours Saturday June 26. We were quite a bit disorientated. The last eight hours (we had checked in for our flight at Karachi at around 17:00 hours) had been a heck of a time. (PK-306 had departed Karachi three hours behind schedule because of inclement weather in Lahore.)
Then came the announcement asking those passengers who had been wishing to terminate their journey at Islamabad to contact the PIA staff. And then came the announcement about a certain PIA flight scheduled to depart Islamabad for Lahore having been cancelled.
Still there was no announcement about the status of our flight. If one PIA flight from Islamabad to Lahore had just been cancelled what chance had there for our flight to depart that very early hours of the morning? To my mind it was certain to be cancelled.
Neither of us had been left with any more energy for waiting and guessing. Since the PIA staff at the Islamabad Airport had given us the choice of terminating our journey in Islamabad, we opted for it.
We had been so disheveled and we have had so much of the departure lounges for that day that all we cared for was to find boarding and lodging at the earliest so that we could "log off" our minds for the day.
We informed the PIA staff that we were terminating our journey.
Soon we exited the terminal building at the airport, jumped in a cab and headed for a hotel near Faizabad in Rawalpindi.
We left Islamabad for Lahore on Sunday, June 27. We spent a day in Lahore and then caught our PIA flight back to Karachi on Monday, June 28.
As we disembarked the plane and headed for the exit at the airport in Karachi I couldn't help but remember a very old PIA slogan that had been coined by the veteran cricket commentator and a PIA director for two decades, the late Omar Kureshi: "With Pakistan International Airlines, it's just like coming home. There's nothing better".
(The writer is a BR staff member)
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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