Life is like a plane ride. It doesn’t always go as planned.

If you’re wondering what that green paper clip drawing is on the map above, it’s the flight path Air Canada 445 followed when it had to abort its landing in Toronto Pearson this morning.

Yep, an aborted landing. A sudden acceleration and ascent just before you touch down on the runway, followed by 60 seconds of uneasiness (fear?) as you wait for the pilot to come on the PA system and tell you why you and the other 100 passengers aren’t safely on the ground. In this case, the plane ahead of us failed to clear the runway and the pilot pulled up and went around. We made a safe landing on the second try.

And thanks to GPS and the in-flight map app, we got to watch ourselves on the map throughout the whole experience.

By the way, the pilot was great this morning. He was on the microphone telling us what had happened in under a minute after the event. I’ve been on other flights that aborted landing at the last instant and had to wait for three or four minutes (which can be terrifying) before we were reassured that there was nothing wrong with our plane.

Of course, there’s always a bonus by making it through the tough days. Maybe I’ll get extra frequent flyer miles from Aeroplan and Air Canada for the extra miles we flew to make the second landing attempt. 🙂