It wasn’t what is generally called “a safe travel” the one that started from London Stansted and ended in Bari Palese last night. After more than an hour of fear in which the pilot had tried to land three times without succeeding, he finally managed to land by using the emergency runway.

“We were flying in a circle around the city for an hour without knowing what was going on,” said one young passenger who did not want to reveal her name. “The cabin crew didn’t seem to know much about it, and both the hostess and the pilot said the control tower wasn’t giving the authorisation to land, but it sounded really weird: the plane was literally one meter above the runway, when it suddenly took off at full throttle. It happened three times.”

Flight FR1905, departed on time from Stansted airport at 4.55 pm yesterday, was fifty minutes late and landed at 9.30 pm. Nobody was hurt and passengers were unharmed, but the shock still remains.

“I was quite calm until someone asked the simple question – is there enough gasoline? -,”  said the  passenger. “In moments like that you realise that human beings can start questioning even the most obvious things since they think that everything might happen to them. Some people started crying, other just panicked, many others were laughing, unsure how to react. It wasn’t a nice scene.”

According to some passengers, during the pilot’s first attempt to land, he didn’t manage to do the right flight manoeuvre toward the runway.

“One moment we were flying toward the city, the moment later we were flying toward the sea, with the city at our back. I even thought about a hijacking,” said another passenger. “I’ll never forget this flight.  It was a real nightmare.”

Sources at the airport revealed that yesterday was a “black Thursday” for the Boeing 737 aircraft, licence EI-EKD. It departed at 6:35 am from London to Memmingen (Germany) and was diverted to Stuttgart. Even the flight from Central Europe back to Stansted was late. And then, of course, the unexplained flight FR1905. The Irish company wasn’t available to give details about what happened. Everybody were safe, yes, but the mystery remains.