Bydgoszcz, Poland

Interesting words, those. Especially when passengers have looked outside and seen the runway lights looming near enough to touch. I remember reading many years ago that pilots weren’t really necessary, and if airlines could persuade people of it we’d have automated flights. But rather like living in the 2000s (or should I, as someone who thinks saying “two thousand and…” sounds a bit more retarded every year, say ‘the 20s’) without the things shown in Tomorrow’s World in my youth, we now have flights that can get very close to the ground and then fly off elsewhere. Cynics tell me that Ryanair sometimes diverts people in order to get a plane where it’s needed, but we did get awfully close to the ground, so surely that’s not what they were doing this time.

After ten minutes of being impressed that the level of conversation in the plane had not become any more panicked or noisy-though travel partner Dave had a commentator switch to transmit behind him further back in the plane-we finally heard that it was just thanks to low cloud. I’m sure we were low enough that landing lights were only 20m away which seems near enough to put down, but perhaps the pilot was a Die Hard 2 fan. We ended up in Bydgoszcz, then had a several hour coach transfer and chose to get a cab to the hotel, in at 1ish. Frankly, after running through all the reasons why one might decide not to land a perfectly good plane at a perfectly good airport, I was just glad to get down, and know that parkrun was go.