| Hawaaon Ke Paighaam | Messages Of The Wind

| Phoenix Flight 505: C |

Note: The fuselage is the middle section of the plane, between the tail and the front and cockpit.

GMT is Greenwich Mean Time- the time zone used for the UK.

And since I went a little medical with my description, cortisol in the simplest of terms is the body's main stress hormone. It is controlled by the brain and its involved in body's response to shock and fear.

The 'armed' position of aircraft doors is a compulsory action which all cabin crew perform before take off. The doors are armed, which just means closing and latching them in a certain way, so that if opened in the armed position for an emergency landing, the evacuation slides automatically launch.

Habibti is the Arabic word for my love/sweetheart(female).

Saiyaara main saiyaara,

saiyaara tu saiyaara

sitaaron ke jahaan mein,

milenge abb yaara...

Bone-chilling cold. That was kind of cold you felt seep into your flesh and bones when you were thrust into sixteen-degree water, your body shaking with the crash of an adrenaline high and cortisol wracking your nervous system until your were nothing but a shivering mass of cold flesh. It was somehow made colder by the darkness around you and the sporadic beams of light coming from the many flashlights handed around seemed like beacons of warmth. The chaos around you felt like a blurry haze and the sounds of people calling out desperately for their loved ones all merged into one, agonising wail.

Meerab gripped onto the side of the life-raft, careful not to tip overboard as she ushered the passengers onto their own life rafts and helped with their life-jackets, her own hand quaking uncontrollably and her body still unprotected without a life-jacket. Holding a seven-month old infant in her hand whilst its mother climbed safely onto a raft, she hugged the baby close and prayed that it didn't take any of the trauma from today with it into the future.

With the passengers safe and somewhat settled, she straightened up and looked around the wreckage, her heart beating in a dangerously unhealthy rhythm as she watched the cabin crew hand out blankets and water. Her hands wrapped around her drenched, shivering body and she huddled into herself, needing to be alone but terrified of the demons she might lurking in her imagination now. The noise of passengers being sick into the water didn't make her wince now and she just dazedly took in the scene in front of her.

The First Class emergency exits on both sides of the plane had opened. They'd had to be opened in the 'armed' position to ensure the evacuation slides were automatically released and inflated on opening.

Arm doors and cross check

The simple instruction given by every flight attendant in-charge at take-off was routine for every member of the cabin crew, but had now taken on a dreadful context. Meerab was on the left side of the plane with half the passengers and some cabin crew. The other side couldn't be seen but had alerted that they'd also evacuated safely. People were bundled up on the evacuation slides and life rafts, with some trying to go on the wing of the plane until the wing had groaned and broke in half from the catastrophic impact.

The Boeing 747, famously called The Queen of The Skies, now lay collapsed and partially submerged in the cold waters of the Persian Gulf, a scant hundred miles from its destination city of Doha, Qatar. Its splendour and its magnificent presence in the skies were reduced to an empty, sinking vessel.

Meerab realised that it didn't matter if you crashed on land or at sea; the feeling of the plane colliding with the water was something you would never, ever forget.