08 Apr 2024

My First Flight

As always, it all starts with adventures and problems, and in a way that I can later laugh at. This was a similar way.

IndiaFOSS 3.0

IndiaFOSS 3.0 was around the corner and we all were preparing for the conference working hard day and night without sleep. That day all of a sudden from nowhere my friends told me that my class test was announced for 26-27-28 October and IndiaFOSS 3.0 was happening on 28th October. I was totally terrified and had no idea of what I was gonna do. All of a sudden one of my colleagues said “Maybe we can do a flight for you” and Vishal Arya booked a flight for me. But, the flight was from Pune because I’m a native of Solapur and the Solapur Airport is not functional due to some political reasons I feel.

It was all pretty sorted, all I had to do was go home on the 26th morning to do the exams but with a little twist. we usually have 2 exams on one day, and on the 27th and 28th the exams were online. I was gonna leave on the 27th after the first written exam and the second exam at 1 was the online one. But, my college has a weird policy that every student should take the online exam from the classroom itself (yeah, totally nonsense but kuchh na kahe ?) and I did not take permission to do that. After the first exam, I just left the college and took a train from Solapur at 2:00 PM. The whole plan was to reach Pune by 6 PM (according to the train schedule) and board the flight at 9:20 PM.

Fun begins

Of course, It did not go as planned. the train got delayed by 1.5 hours and I was totally terrified, all I wanted was to attend the conference which I had worked day and night for and also have fun with all the other people at the conference. It was just something that I never wanted to miss.

The train reached Pune railway station at 7:30 PM and what I had to do was just run because the boarding gate was to be closed at 8:25 and I was pretty far from the airport in the traffic, so all I was worried about was not missing the flight. It was the first time I was going to sit on a plane and also my dad had booked a plane ticket for the first time to come to the conference. we reached Pune station by 8:35 and rushed towards the boarding gate, they were just going to close and I finally managed to stop them and get inside.

We got into the aircraft and I was like “Andar se itna chhota hota hai” lmao, but yeah made sense because it wasn’t as big as others, but it still had that feeling. We got to our seats, I had booked a window seat for my dad and he was like a small kid who adores everything lol.

It was a Boeing 737 Aircraft if I remember correctly. I was always somehow interested in aircraft but never really went into the technical depths other than just surface level. I remember watching this good documentary called “The Boeing Scandal”, was a pretty good one but not very much in-depth explaining everything about what happened in the scandal related to Boeing 737 MAX.

The take-off was very pretty scary and my heart started beating faster during the speed run on the runway, but it was fun. And like every other first-timer, I did have a headache and murmuring feeling. After landing, I was just amazed looking at that big ass Airport.

Great experience tho, all thanks to FOSS United xD.