TV legend Jeremy Clarkson has recounted a harrowing brush with death, revealing his unexpected final thoughts during a terrifying mid-air crisis.
The 64 year old motoring enthusiast and presenter of the hit Amazon Prime show Clarkson’s Farm, shared his chilling experience of nearly meeting his maker when the vintage plane he was in flipped upside down and spiralled towards the earth after being struck by lightning.
Speaking to The Sun, Clarkson described the moment of terror aboard the antiquated Russian aircraft, once part of the Angolan Air Force and later acquired by a Cuban airline, as it approached Havana.
Clarkson humorously noted that as the engines howled and the pilot fought to regain control, his main irritation was not the fear of impending doom but rather his hair getting tangled in one of the overhead fans: “I was in a plane that had been built in Russia in the Fifties and used by the Angolan Air Force before being bought by a ramshackle airline in Cuba, and we were flying into Havana when it was struck by lightning. This caused it to turn upside down and start plummeting towards Earth.”
He amusingly remarked on his priorities at that life-or-death moment: “Well, here’s the funny thing. Instead of air vents, there were little Pifco-style fans above each seat and, as the plane turned over, my hair got caught in the blades.
“So that’s what I was thinking as the engines screamed and the pilot tried to regain control: ‘This is really annoying.'”
Jeremy Clarkson has previously described his brush with death in an article for The Times back in 2009. At the time, it wasn’t imminent death that bothered him but the unexpected annoyance of the plane’s toilets emptying their full contents into the cabin due to being upside down.
He expressed his displeasure while recalling: “You didn’t think about the lavatories did you? When the plane is the wrong way up, they are too, and that means they empty their entire contents, including some home-made tampons, onto the roof.”
He explained that he was hanging by his seatbelt and was upside down, adding that he was “Very uncomfortable”.
It’s not the first time Jeremy has had a bad experience with planes either, after two planes narrowly avoided crashing into each other near his Diddly Squat Farm last year.
