A van, a teacher and some planes

Leonardo DiCaprio talking to Ellen DeGeneres about his bad luck with planes:

"I jumped out of an airplane and my first shoot didn't open. It's tandem, so someone's on your back. They cut that line and we started free-falling towards Earth, and that's when you get the 8 by 10 glossies of your whole life flashing before your eyes. And then the second one was tangled as well and I saw all of my friends popping off with their parachutes and I'm still plummeting towards planet Earth. And then that was tangled for about a good 20/30 seconds and then he untangled it and then he told me: 'Oh, you're probably going to break your legs now because we're going too fast.' So that was one of the worst experiences of my life and I'll never do it again.

"[A separate occasion] I was on a plane to Russia and the engine exploded. I was looking out the window and the entire engine just turned into a fireball. It was right after Sully had that incident happen to him where the geese flew into both engines. This happened in one of the engines and I was the only person there that seemed to see this - but it was a flaming fireball! It was all Russian passengers and I kind of felt like I'd already died and gone to heaven 'cos no-one said anything and I was screaming at the top of my lungs: 'What the hell is going on here?!' The stewardess came out and said: 'We seem to have a slight problem here'. A Russian guy finally said: 'What is the problem?' She said: 'We lost one of our engines.' And he says: 'How many engines did we have?' She said: 'Well we had two, now we have one.' He said: 'That, that is not good.' And we basically dumped fuel for 45 minutes and did and emergency landing and all of our tyres exploded and there was a hundred different ambulances and it was on CNN and, well, that was another bummer."

Welcome to Newsletter #22

A tale I read

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