The year was 2009, and I was returning home from a stint in Japan. I was on that long, long flight from Kansai International Airport (KIX) in Osaka to San Francisco, where I would go through Customs and catch a flight for Denver, where we lived at the time, and home. I don’t sleep well on airplanes, but the weeks preceding my trip home had been busy, and with the help of a couple of snorts of airline bourbon, I managed to nod off.
I woke up to the plane shaking. The seatbelt light came on, and the captain warned us that we were encountering turbulence. “No joke,” I thought. Then the really hair-raising part came – the plane hit some kind of cell, I forget precisely what the captain later called it – and dropped about 500 feet in free fall. Holy moly, considering that we were over the mid-Pacific, that was the very definition of “pucker factor.”
Everything came out OK, and we landed…
