Several Flights over the Pacific Ocean have been "Hazardous for me" over the years

 The first one was returning to San Francisco from Incheon Airport in South Korea after visiting my son when he lived there with his wife and son about 8 years ago now. The flight is about 11 hours from Incheon island to San Francisco. However, for 9 of those 11 hours we must have been traveling through or above a big storm because it began to shake and silverware and cups and saucers were bouncing off the tray tables and some silverware went into the seat mechanism of the empty seat next to me in business class. Most travelers were businessmen used to feeling like they might die in rough weather over the Pacific ocean and so hardened to this 9 hours of constant shaking. Even I have been a pilot and know just how rough air can be especially below 10,000 feet where air is thicker. But, generally at 30,000 to 40,000 feet the air is so very thin that this thinness of the air cushions your flight a lot more than below 10,000 feet in altitude. But 9 HOURS OF CONSTANT SHAKING?

I had to go to the bathroom and so undid my seatbelt during this time before I went my business class electrically adjustable seat for sleeping and the stewardess on Singapore Airlines couldn't speak much English and told me to stay seated. I said "If I don't go the bathroom now I'm going to wet the seat. So, I grabbed seats on the way to the bathroom so I wouldn't fall down in the bouncing.

The most recent of several difficult events like this was just on an interisland flight from kauai and Lihue to kahului Airport on Maui where we couldn't land at first because it was just so very rough. this time it took an extra half an hour to try to land without crashing because of turbulence there but finally we did but I thought we were at the airport near Kaanapali and Lahaina by that time because I was confused by all the changes in flight patterns going around the whole island to try to land once again.

So, the length of not knowing whether my wife and I and my friends were going to live or die was very unsettling. And I have been a pilot so this in this case made it even more difficult to deal with because of what I knew, especially the first time we tried to land and couldn't. I knew by the way things were going at about 50 or 100 feet from the ground on the first approach that if we landed we would crash as a pilot.