Traveling by air can be fun but sometimes it can be scary. For me, and probably for most people, big planes are fine but smaller ones are rickety, unstable and straight up scary when flying in them.

One time I took a flight from JKIA in Nairobi, Kenya to my home town of Eldoret but since there were a few passengers going to Kisumu, a lakeside city, the Captain announced mid-flight that we were going to Kisumu first then proceed to Eldoret from there. 

We were all fine with the plan although the pilot had withheld some important info from the passengers, well from me at least. 

Nobody told me that the flight from Kisumu to Eldoret takes only 14 minutes and the plane (50 seater, I think) would barely lift off the ground! It turns out that for a smooth ride, the plane has to get to a certain altitude. This one was about 50 or so meters above the ground (or so it appeared). If the windows were open, I could have touched a few trees below in Kakamega forest!

I have never felt so close to accepting to go home to heaven... I looked around and everyone seemed deep in their last prayers! I said mine too but with one eye open. 

Thankfully, we arrived in one piece but I declared there and then that there would be no more flying for me for the rest of my life! If I couldn't walk or drive going somewhere, that was fine but anywhere that needed flying to reach was just too dangerous to go and would give it a pass.

However, I did not stick to my rules for long or let's just say I forgot the "near-death"  experience I had undergone a few years earlier. I soon got myself in the same predicament although it was in another country, another hemisphere. 

This time I was flying from Toronto Pearson Airport in Canada to Rochester Airport in New York, USA.

I went online as usual to book an air ticket, found one and bought it. On the day before the flight, I checked in online. When I got to the point of choosing seats, I was perplexed that I wasn't able to choose a window seat as all that was available was an aisle seat in every row of the plane.

Well, I later found out that the reason all those seats were aisle seats was because it was a little plane with just 16 seats, eight on each side, two seats in each row. For reference, the biggest plane I've flown, an Airbus A380 had 10 seats in just one row and carrying over 800 passengers! The good thing was that all those aisle seats were also by default,  window seats!

I should have known something was amiss when we were led to the boarding area. Instead of going to a normal gate, we went totally outside the airport building and walked about seven or eight minutes into a field! In the horizon, I saw a little plane emblazoned with the famous words, "Air Canada" and I thought that was probably a small plane for training or something similar. Shock on me when I saw the pilot and the first officer ushering us in! 

They took our luggage and shoved it underneath the plane. I wondered why Air Canada, as big as it is, didn't even have enough staff to handle luggage but made the guys who we were meant to be trust our lives on putting away luggage instead of reviewing the flight paths and other more demanding duties.

The flight was smooth for the most part and unlike bigger planes I had been on, I was able to see the pilot steering the plane right from my seat. The cockpit was separated from the rest of the plane by just a curtain! Thank goodness all the 16 of us were good people because if someone had thoughts of hijacking that plane, his or her work was already cut out for them. All they had to do, God forbid, was to draw the curtain and commandeer the plane.

The flight time was about 18 minutes long and I think we were just 10,000 or so feet above sea level. A plane flying above the Atlantic goes up to about 40,000 feet.

The landing was brief and uneventful which is always a good thing. We didn't clap for the pilot though, maybe because 18 minutes isn't long enough to feel like someone has done anything exceptional. Or maybe we just got too familiar with the pilot after seeing him put away our luggage...

The flight back was just like the first leg only that there was a storm in Toronto area so we were delayed for about 40 minutes to wait for the storm to abate. 

We took off but 10 minutes into the flight, we could see dark clouds then without warning, we flew right into the eye, nose and throat of the storm! Our little plane was no match for the tornado-like storm and I knew things were serious when the pilot and the assistant closed the curtain, maybe so that we couldn't see them struggling to keep the plane in the air.

I could see part of the cockpit through a gap in the curtain. The pilot was wrestling with the controls because at that point, the plane was being thrown around like a piece or paper. I looked around and every was silent and scared. A lady sitting across from me had her eyes closed and her hands firmly digging into her seats armrests.

We left the storm as fast as we entered and was greeted by the familiar and heartwarming sight of Toronto's skyline. We were all glad that we had survived eight or so minutes of that grueling flight. This time, after we had touched the ground, all passengers erupted into a thunderous applause. I think I clapped longer than everyone and said a thanksgiving prayer.

I still wonder why someone would choose a job of flying such little aircraft when they know that they would occasionally have to deal with such storms and other occupational hazards related to that profession but as they say, someone has to do it and for that, I admire and revere them.