[ZAMIRZ]

I've flown my fair share of domestic flights in Iran back in the '90s. Old planes, cowboy pilots, really a life and death adventure that I don't care for anymore. I flew mostly boeing and airbus. Their boeing fleet make you feel very nostalgic, hardly any of them have been updated since the revolution. Wild interior colors (we're talking viper green, signal orange and bahama yellow seat fabric with brown plastic galleys and off-white walls and overhead bins) and very loud inside too with lots of creaks and groans from the airframe.

One time, we were coming back from Tabriz to Tehran / Mehrabad Int'l (which has now been relegated to mostly domestic flights and service to Mecca, Imam Khomeini is the new Int'l airport that services Tehran) and I guess one of the engines went out. The pilot just came on the intercom and told us one engine is out, but not to worry, he has flown this plane on only one engine before. He set it down on that broke-ass Mehrabad runway perfectly. I was a kid at the time and thought it was kind of adventurous, no way in hell I'd want to do it again.

Another time we were landing in Shiraz from Esfahan and I look out the window to see us passing the runway at a fairly low altitude. As soon as I started to figure out what was going on, the pilot banked the plane really hard to the left pinning my weight up against the wall of the fuselage and he brought it right around and then jacked the stick back over, straightened it out and set it down. Before I could even begin to freak out, the plane was slowing down and taxiing to the gate.