SRINAGAR: On May 21, when senior Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Derek O’Brien boarded an IndiGo flight from Delhi to Srinagar, he expected little more than another routine journey in public life. But what unfolded in the skies over North India left him shaken, emotional, and profoundly altered.
O’Brien was en route as part of a four-member opposition delegation visiting shell-impacted communities along the border in Jammu and Kashmir, following Pakistan’s artillery fire in response to India’s covert Operation Sindoor. But before the delegation could meet the victims of the border conflict, they themselves would face an ordeal of terrifying proportions.
Writing on the NDTV website days later, O’Brien recounted in gripping, personal prose the harrowing 10-minute sequence mid-air that he described as “not your regular turbulence.” What began with a seatbelt announcement quickly descended into a violent storm of lightning, hail, and near-constant vertical tilts that shook even the most seasoned travellers.
“The plane is scarily tilting to the right,” O’Brien wrote. “We are hurtling down, seemingly to a sickening drop… Not a minute or two, I would say, at least ten terrifying minutes.”
Passengers screamed, chanted prayers, and attempted to record the ordeal until a voice — its origin lost in the panic — demanded, “Stop filming.” O’Brien, seated at emergency exit 19F on the right-hand side of the Airbus A321neo, was among those who believed he might not make it out alive. “My life doesn’t flash before me,” he wrote. “Instead, I’m consumed by the thought that I will miss the wedding of my only daughter.”
Through the fear and chaos, O’Brien said he experienced an overwhelming sorrow — not just for his own life, but for the relationships that might be prematurely severed. He thought of his wife, his daughters, his brothers, his friends. “Sadness. The sadness is overwhelming,” he recalled. “It is a deep, abiding sorrow for relationships and friendships that will not progress beyond this fraught afternoon.”
As the flight made its eventual approach into Srinagar, there was one final note of unease — a request for all passengers to pull down their window shades. The aircraft was being directed to land at a military airfield. The nose of the plane, O’Brien later discovered, had sustained visible damage. Pakistan, according to reports, had refused permission for a precautionary halt.
After disembarkation, the MP remained seated for several moments, processing what had happened. When he finally rose, it was to personally thank the pilots — one of whom told him it was “the most difficult flight” in his four-decade-long career. “We kept speaking,” O’Brien wrote, “but I promised him that the rest of our conversation would remain private forever.”
A week later, back home and struggling to make sense of the trauma, O’Brien broke down while speaking to a childhood friend. “He did the best thing any friend could ever have done. He listened,” O’Brien wrote, recounting how he sobbed between long silences, held only by his friend’s simple, gentle words: “It’s all right. I’m here.”
Now, as the political veteran reflects on that flight, his emotions remain raw, but his message is clear: life is a gift. “That flight changed who I am. It changed how I regard every aspect of my life,” he wrote. “I haven’t forgotten my pact. It will be the basis of the new profound gratitude I have for life.”
