A flight bound for Tunisia's capital aborted three landing attempts in extreme turbulence before diverting to an airport 60 miles away, with passengers screaming and one crying out that they would die.
The aircraft, traveling from Istanbul to Tunis-Carthage International Airport, ran into severe weather on approach that forced the pilot to pull up three times. Each attempt failed. Video posted to Instagram by passenger Marina Maiskaya showed travelers white-knuckling their armrests as the cabin shook violently, and at least one passenger can be heard screaming "we will die." The airline operating the flight has not been publicly identified, and no official statement from the carrier or airport authorities has surfaced.
After circling the sky and failing to put the plane down, the pilot diverted roughly 60 miles south to Enfidha-Hammamet International Airport, where the aircraft finally touched down safely. Passengers broke into applause.
Maiskaya, who shared the footage on Thursday, offered a blunt account of what she experienced. She told The Sun:
"I have never in my life feared for my life like that."
She went further, describing the physical violence of the turbulence across all three failed approaches.
"We were shaken violently each time, and on the third attempt, we actually started to plummet."
No injuries were reported on the Istanbul-to-Tunis flight. But the gap between a safe diversion and a catastrophe is measured in seconds and altitude, and Maiskaya's account makes clear how thin that margin felt from a passenger seat.
The Tunisia scare follows another turbulence incident that drew attention in early August. An Air India flight carrying 134 people from Phuket, Thailand, to Delhi plunged an estimated 300 feet roughly 90 minutes after takeoff. Ten passengers and two crew members were hurt. Emergency crews met the plane on the tarmac at Indira Gandhi International Airport after it landed safely.
That incident put a dozen people in the care of medical teams. The Istanbul-to-Tunis flight, by contrast, ended with applause rather than stretchers, but both episodes underscore how quickly routine commercial travel can turn dangerous when weather or atmospheric conditions shift.
Key details about the Tunisia-bound flight are still missing. No outlet has named the airline or the flight number. The exact date, identified only as a recent Thursday, has not been pinned down. The number of passengers and crew aboard is unknown. And the specific weather conditions that made Tunis-Carthage unapproachable three consecutive times have not been disclosed by any aviation authority or meteorological agency.
None of that information is trivial. Passengers deserve to know which carrier put them through a triple-abort approach, and the flying public deserves to know what weather data the crew had before attempting the first landing, let alone the second and third.
When a plane full of people is screaming and a pilot is pulling up for the third time, somebody owes the public more than silence.
