Captain Solomon Quainoo, the first Ghanaian to fly the world’s biggest passenger aircraft, Emirates’ Airbus A380, has confessed that he could not hold back his tears of joy the first time he got to fly a plane.
During an interview on TV3’s “The Day Show” monitored by Yawanews.com, he shared with Berla Mundi that, “The first time I got to fly, it was amazing because this has been a dream since I was six years and I can be a bit emotional sometimes so when I sat in the plane, at some point I started crying and praying and thanking God for making it possible. I didn’t let my captain see me. I was hiding and crying”.
This, he said, was when he flew from East Midlands to Brussels as a co-pilot. “I wasn’t the captain but people have the notion that co-pilots don’t fly. You do the same job as the captain but the captain has the overall overseeing authority when you’re flying. For instance, when you’re flying to kumasi and back, the captain will do one sector, flying from acccra to kumasi and the co-pilot will fly from kumasi to accra, just that the captain is more experienced so with certain things, he can advice the co-pilot on how to do it”, he clarified.
Speaking on whether he has experienced any scary moments as a pilot, he replied in the negative, saying, “Luckily for me, not really. You fly into ghastly and very dangerous winds but we’ve been trained to cope with that so I don’t see it as a scary moment”.
Cap. Quainoo added, “The Bible says for lack of knowledge my people perish so if you have the knowledge and see people experience turbulence and panic, I as a pilot know that the plane is not going to come down in turbulence, so I am never panicked”.
According to him, there are many things that can cause a plane to crash but a turbulence is never one of them. “The only reason they tell you to sit down is you may injure yourself. The plane will bounce up and down and you may break a leg or something but it will never bring the plane down”, he educated.
