Photo by Harrison Haines on <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-wooden-opened-door-shed-2869565/" rel="nofollow">Pexels.com</a>
By Ahmet Abdulaziz….
Frequently we come across the last words of famous personalities. The history books and the biographies usually contain these, but recently I came across a video on youtube, regarding the last words of the pilots of crashed airplanes.
I had never thought that there might be any such video, though I always wanted to understand the instant feeling of a person at the last moment of a crash. May it be a plane or any other crash, I was always interested in knowing that.
It was indeed an unusual topic, which attracted a lot to a person like me, who always considers life as an ongoing adventure. I had never thought that there might be any such video, though I always wanted to understand the instant feeling of a person at the last moment of a crash. May it be a plane or any other crash,
We all know that death is inevitable and unavoidable. It’s the unignorable reality, that we realise again and again as we see people around us leaving this world every day. But still, we always keep ourselves believing that our turn is still far away.
However, things change abruptly, when all of a sudden one finds himself/herself in a situation of instant sure death. That’s actually what happens during accidents. I always try to understand what might be the last feelings, the last words of the person in such circumstances.
One of our distant relatives used to be a railway engine driver in Pakistan, during the 1970s. I remember meeting him after getting the news of the train that he was operating had met with an accident. When we went to meet him in the hospital, he was in good physical condition, with some non-serious injuries. Yet he still was under great shock. Since he was a distant cousin of my father, I was not in a position to directly ask him what he had felt at the moment, when his locomotive was going to crash.
But while talking to my father, I heard him telling about the accident. It was a foggy day, and the speed of his train was somewhat less, due to that reason when all of a sudden he had seen another locomotive approaching fast towards him on the same rail. It was a grave mistake, of the railway technician, who had allowed two trains in opposite directions, on the same track.
Due to thick fog, nobody could see anything until the operators of the two moving locomotives all of a sudden saw each other, just seconds before crashing.. He said, that though he was operating the train engine for the most part of his life, that was the first time that he had found himself in such a grave situation. That was the moment when the operators of both locomotives had felt the “sudden” and “sure” death.
I remember him telling my father that he had cried loudly saying “that’s it”. Those were going to be his last words had he not survived that train crash.
But luckily, the speed of both the trains was slow. With last moment endeavours of both the operators, though the two trains collided, it was not a big crash. Some passengers also were injured due to the sudden application of emergency brakes, but there was no loss of human lives.
