Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 91 of the Listening Time podcast.
Thank you all for listening.
I hope that this podcast has been very helpful for you.
And thank you to all of my Listening Time members and all of the people that have signed up for the higher tiers of the membership.
Thank you all for your support and for helping me do what I do.
Remember that if you haven't signed up for my membership, you can do that and you'll receive my specialized training.
And specifically, if you want my advanced episodes where I speak at normal speed, then make sure to become a Listening Time family member or VIP and you'll receive two new advanced episodes every month.
So if you want that, then make sure to click on the link in the episode description below this episode and you can sign up there.
And if you want to ask me questions regarding English or language learning and have me answer them in a video QA session, then become a Listening Time VIP.
So, like I said, the link is in the episode description below this episode.
That's patreoncom slash listening time.
Make sure to follow me on Facebook if you want more free English practice.
I post a lot of content on there, so follow me on Facebook.
The link is also in the description.
Alright, in today's episode, I'm going to talk a little bit about my worst flying experiences.
So this should be a fun one because it's always fun to tell bad stories after they happen.
It's not fun when it's happening, but it's fun to talk about this story afterwards, when it's already over.
So I'll tell a few different stories about bad flying experiences that I've had.
Remember that you have the transcript for this episode in the description, so click on that if you need it.
And if you like this podcast, please give it a five-star rating and a review and share it with anyone else you know who's learning English.
All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
All right, let's talk about my worst flying experiences.
So I've flown a lot in my life.
I've probably flown a lot more than the average person just because I have had to travel a lot back and forth between places my city, my hometown and my city in Mexico where I lived for years.
In English when we say that you do something back and forth, like you go back and forth, fly back and forth, etc.
This just means that you go between those two places again and again, right?
So I fly back one of those places and then I fly back here, and then I fly there again and I fly back here.
So I've had to fly back and forth a lot between these two places.
So I have probably been on I don't know how many flights or how many individual planes probably more than 200 in my life, I imagine.
So I've flown a lot.
And so because of that, I'm not scared of flying.
I'm not like terrified of flying. being in the air.
However, I am nervous about being so high above the ground in a man-made machine.
I still get nervous today, even though I've flown many times, maybe even hundreds of times.
So I'm one of those people that gets a little bit nervous, but I mostly get nervous during the takeoff and during the landing.
Not so much while we're in the air.
Mostly the takeoff.
That's when I get the most nervous.
And then after that, I'm usually perfectly fine.
So I'm not the person that gets really scared on flights, especially when we're in the sky.
But there have been a couple occasions when I have gotten scared.
So let me talk about those.
So maybe my worst experience on a flight was when I experienced really bad turbulence.
The word turbulence refers to when you're on a plane and And you're flying and the plane starts shaking.
This is turbulence.
So normally turbulence doesn't bother me at all.
And turbulence is perfectly normal.
It's not something to worry about.
But sometimes it can get bad and that's not fun.
So there was one occasion in particular when it got pretty bad.
That was when I was flying from Guadalajara to Tijuana and it was a sunny day.
The weather looked great.
It didn't look like a day where there would be a lot of bad conditions in the sky.
However, when we were close to landing maybe less than 30 minutes from our destination the plane started to experience some turbulence, And that wasn't a problem for me.
I never care when that happens.
I was reading a book and just minding my own business, as we say.
And the turbulence started to get a little rockier.
In English, when we say that something is rocky, that means that it's not smooth.
It's the opposite of smooth.
So the turbulence got rockier.
It started to get a little more violent, we could also say.
And we started to experience a few drops where the plane would drop for a second and you would feel that sensation in your stomach, right.
And then all of a sudden there was a free fall.
In English, when we use the term free fall, we're talking about something that is falling in the sky from a high place usually, and there's nothing to stop it from falling.
It's just falling at full speed.
So if you've ever gone skydiving before, you will experience free fall for a short period of time when you jump out of the aircraft and you're just falling down right.
And people started screaming, crying.
There was this one young man that had really bad anxiety and he was just screaming at the top of his lungs.
In English, we use that phrase scream at the top of your lungs to mean that you're screaming with full force.
So he was screaming at the top of his lungs and the flight attendants were rushing to get back to their seats.
And for a few seconds, everything was crazy.
And then thankfully, that was the worst of it.
It was still kind of bad after that, but we didn't have another free fall that was as drastic as that one.
But it was bad enough that I stopped reading when I stopped reading on a flight.
You know that things are getting a little uncomfortable because normally I can just read during the turbulence.
It doesn't matter to me.
But that was another level.
So that was the worst turbulence that I ever experienced.
If you've never had this happen to you on a plane before, Be thankful because it's not fun.
It feels very scary.
Even if, like me, you know that there's no danger.
This is really normal.
Planes are built to withstand crazy turbulence.
So it's not something you need to worry about.
And I've had students before that are flight attendants and pilots.
And I've asked them all of my questions regarding safety on planes and I've learned a lot from them, and I've learned enough to know when to actually be concerned and when there's no cause for concern.
And I've never been in a situation where I should actually be concerned.
That's never happened, thankfully.
But this one was the time when I experienced the worst turbulence.
All right, let me talk about another situation now.
So the next one has to do with the landing.
So this happened to me last year, actually.
And in total I've actually been on three different flights where there was some issue with the landing and we couldn't land properly when we wanted to.
That's happened a few times to me.
But the first two times weren't that bad.
This third time that happened last year was definitely the most extreme.
So we were flying from Tijuana to Guadalajara and this was at the end of the summer and there was a big storm in guadalajara because this happens a lot during the summer and it was a big thunderstorm, but planes were still landing at the airport there And we were approaching the airport and we were descending and getting ready to land.
Everything seemed relatively normal and we were going lower and lower and lower.
And we were all waiting to feel the wheels of the plane touch the ground because we were on the runway.
In English, the word runway refers to the strip of ground where the plane takes off and lands.
So we were right over the runway and we were all waiting to feel the plane touch the ground.
And it didn't.
And all of a sudden I heard this big roar of the engine like it was going into turbo or something.
And the plane felt like it started going faster and then it went up.
And we didn't actually land.
We were really, really close to the ground.
I'm talking like, I don't know, a few meters almost from the ground.
And we didn't land.
We actually landed, went up and went back into the sky and it was a really strange thing and everyone was a little nervous about what had just happened.
Thankfully, we were still okay, but everyone was wondering what just happened.
And then finally, after a few minutes, the pilot told us that the conditions were making it a little risky to land, and so they decided to abort the landing, as we say.
And so that was okay.
But then we were back in the sky in the middle of the thunderstorm.
We were right in the heart of the storm.
And every two or three seconds, there was a flash of lightning all around our plane.
Just a flash after flash of lightning.
And it was really freaky, to be honest.
We were flying through the storm and the lightning was lighting up our windows.
And we thought that at any moment the lightning would hit our plane, which happens sometimes.
And it's usually not a big problem, but it's still a scary thought for most people.
But I couldn't see anything but these flashes of lightning all around us every few seconds.
And I think almost everyone was pretty nervous at this point.
And I saw other people gripping their armrest.
In English, we use the word grip to say that someone is grabbing something.
So people were grabbing their armrests pretty tightly.
The only person who didn't seem to be affected at all during all of this was my wife.
My wife doesn't get nervous at all during flights.
She thought the lightning was super cool and she has absolutely no fear at all when it comes to flying or flying being in that situation.
So everyone else was a little nervous, but my wife thought it was really cool and so we just had to do one big loop in the sky.
In English the word loop refers to a circle, so we had to do a big loop in the sky and then come back and And try our landing again.
And this time it was okay.
And we actually landed.
And I was very thankful to be on the ground.
So that was a little bit of a scary experience for me.
Maybe it didn't sound too scary now as I told it to you.
But in the moment I was pretty nervous.
Alright, I have one other story to tell you.
This one is different because it's not related to being scared on a flight.
This one has to do with a flight not going as planned.
So this happened a few years ago.
We were flying from Guadalajara to Tijuana and everything was normal about the flight until about maybe two thirds of the way to Tijuana, I noticed that we were not flying in the direction of Tijuana anymore.
I'm sure that nobody else on the flight even noticed this, but because I've done this flight so many times, I know this flight like the back of my hand.
In English we can say that we know something like the back of our hand, to say that we know it really well.
So I know this flight like the back of my hand.
I can tell when we're on course and when we're not on course.
And suddenly I realized we were not on course.
We were flying in a little bit of a different direction.
Not like completely different, but just a little bit off.
And then I waited for some announcement.
And, sure enough, about five minutes later, the pilot told us that we were flying to a different city because Tijuana was experiencing fog.
This is when you have a really thick white like cloud.
It's not the same thing, but it's kind of like a big cloudy atmosphere where you can't really see much.
We call that fog in English.
And so because of this fog, it wasn't safe for any planes to land at the airport there.
So we had to go to a different city called Hermosillo and we had to land there.
And then once we landed, we waited.
We didn't get off the plane.
We just waited there for about an hour, waiting to see if the conditions would change in Tijuana so that we could go and fly there.
But the conditions did not change.
And so we had to get off the plane and we had to wait inside the airport there for more information about our flight.
And there were a few other planes that had also landed there and they were also waiting for the same information, and it took hours before we could finally get information about what would happen, and they told us that we had to wait until the next morning until we could actually fly to Tijuana.
And this was terrible.
We had to sleep there overnight on the ground and because this wasn't technically the airline's fault, they didn't give us anything to help us.
They didn't give us any money or refund.
They didn't provide us any food, nothing.
We just had to sleep on the cold ground there at the airport and wait until the morning, And there was only one store open in this airport late at night.
And so there was a really long line to try to buy food from this one store.
And this was an awful experience.
We were so tired.
We had nothing to eat.
We were sleeping on the ground.
It was a really bad experience.
And then thankfully, in the morning, we were actually able to fly to Tijuana.
But the bad thing was that there were a lot of people arriving at the same time because nobody had been able to land at the airport there the night before.
So everyone was arriving the next morning.
And so it was super crowded and we had to wait in line for a really long time to actually cross the bridge which goes from the Tijuana airport to San Diego, California.
There's a bridge that actually goes over the border, which is very convenient for people who want to go to San Diego.
They can just fly to Tijuana and then take this bridge from the airport over into the US.
So usually there's almost no one there.
It's very easy to cross, but this time it was a nightmare.
There were so many people there at the same time trying to cross.
So it took us a long time to finally get to the US.
It was like a day, a full day pretty much.
But it was a really bad experience and I hope that never happens to me again.
So that was not the same type of bad experience.
We weren't scared or anything. but it was really annoying and uncomfortable and exhausting.
So that was another one of my worst flying experiences.
All right, why don't we stop there for today?
I hope this episode was interesting for you, and I hope it was good practice for your listening.
Remember that if you want my specialized training, you can click on the link in the episode description below this episode to become a member.
And if you want my advanced podcast episodes, then you can become a Listening Time family member or VIP and you'll receive two new advanced episodes every month where I speak at normal speed.
This will help you practice to become an advanced listener.
And if you want to ask me questions about English or language learning, then become a Listening Time VIP and you can ask me questions every week.
And I'll answer those in a video Q&A session.
And also follow me on Facebook to receive a lot of free English practice.
That will be helpful for you as well.
So click on the Facebook link in the episode description.
And of course, you also have the transcript there.
And so you can listen to this episode as many times as you need until you can eventually understand everything that I'm saying without using the transcript.
And if you like this podcast, please give it a five-star rating and give it a review, and share it with anyone else you know who's learning English.
All right, thank you for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
