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Team New Zealand in action - Source: Chris Cameron/Photosport -
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Everyone knows that inadvertent sigh of relief, however slight, when your plane touches down safely at its destination.
Even the most experienced travellers admit to having dark thoughts at some stage during a flight.
I am just as prone to an over-vivid imagination as anyone and my usual way of clearing my mind is to remember that the pilot also wants to live and he wouldn't be flying the plane if he wasn't totally convinced it was going to reach its destination as planned. After all, he flies planes every day for a living.
The trouble with Meridiana charter flight No. IG2068 from Lisbon in Portugal to Olbia on the Italian island of Sardinia was that it all the ingredients of a disaster movie in horribly vivid technicolour and "Sensaround" sound.
First there was the build-up of the various back stories. The charter flight was arranged to get sailors, technical people, media folk and their supporters from the AudiMedCup to La Maddalena, a little island off Sardinia which is the venue for the Louis Vuitton Trophy which starts this weekend.
It was deemed much easier and more cost-effective to charter a plane than take the various more tortuous routes across Europe. There were plenty of takers so the deal was on.
After little more than a troubled hour's sleep on Sunday night (having had to stay up to make sure the computer was sending the final MedCup story for the News) I was picked up along with two internationally renowned yachting photographers - Chris Cameron from Emirates Team New Zealand and Ian Roman from England - shortly after 0400 hrs and driven to Lisbon Airport where we checked in for the flight.
Familiar faces were everywhere but it wasn't until we were on an airport bus being driven out to the plane that my mind started to be assailed by the aforementioned dark thoughts.
Everywhere I looked was a famous professional sailor; alongside me Torben Grael, the Volvo Ocean Race winner with four Olymopic medals including and a long history in the America's Cup; in front me Dean Barker, casually chatting on his mobile phone; Paul Cayard, another Volvo Ocean Race winner with huge America's Cup experience; Ed Baird, winner of the America's Cup in Valencia and a World Sailor of the Year.
They kept sliding into vision along the lines of the cameos setting up the doomed in movies like Titanic, Towering Inferno, Earthquake, the Poseidon Adventure and, of course, Airplane.
Getting off the bus I looked carefully at the aircraft. It was not a reassuring sight. The McDonnell-Douglas MD-80 has its two engines towards the end of the fuselage and looks a little long in the tooth, an assumption confirmed in the rather tired toilet cubicle by the sign that tells you how to dispose of your cigarette end.
As one of the first on the plane I sat down and watched yet more renowned sailors embark, including most of the ETNZ crew who'd just won the AudiMedCup regatta in Portugal. Among them was tactician Ray Davies who later in the flight I saw right at the back of the plane quietly playing his guitar, the nun in Airplane coming to mind?
Strolling down the aisle I saw a yet more sailing legends, many with Olympic medals like Jochen Schuemann from Germany, Britain's Ben Ainslie, Ian Percy, and Andrew"Bart" Simpson, and New Zealander John Cutler.
The unmentioned morbid thought was of course the potential loss to the sailing world of this amazing and irreplaceable wealth of talent with so much still to achieve.
I wasn't the only one thinking along such lines. Talking to Ian Roman later he said he'd also looked around and counted the potential cost. So there was rather more than a slight sigh of relief when the plane touched down safely.
