JACK RODWELL has revealed he feared he might DIE during Sunderland’s terror flight to Geneva.
David Moyes’ Black Cats had to make an emergency landing on Sunday when an engine failed on the jet taking them to their pre-season tour.
And lifting the lid on their nightmare trip for the first time, Rodwell, 25, admitted: “I have never experienced anything like that.
“It was frightening. I didn’t want to fly again.
“The air hostess said, ‘We’ve got to go down, it’s not good’.
“She had said, ‘It’s OK, we can fly on one engine’. But they had shut the engine down completely.
“It took us about 15 minutes to get down and you’re thinking, ‘What if the other engine goes?’. You’re gone then, aren’t you?”
Pilots noticed the fault early into Sunday’s flight from Newcastle, then turned round the aircraft between Stafford and Derby, before grounding it in Manchester.
Rodwell said: “I was sat at the back with Lee Cattermole and Billy Jones, right next to the engine.
“So half the plane at the front didn’t really hear much, but I was in the second last row.
“It sounded like a chainsaw was trying to start.
“We were like, ‘What the hell was that?’. It sounded a bit like bags had dropped out of the plane.
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“We shouted for the air hostess and asked if she had heard the noise.
“She had, and we could tell her face wasn’t right.
“We knew then that they had to get the plane down – it was scary.
“It was worrying me that they didn’t really keep us informed. I was thinking, ‘Are they even on top of this here?’.
“When we landed they said it was actually worse than what they made out.
“They told us it was a one in 35 million chance of that sort of thing happening.” After the emergency landing, Sunderland’s stars waited for replacement plane to arrive from Aberdeen, before finally touching down in Geneva and then heading to their French base in Evian.
Rodwell added: “Half of us were so scared that we didn’t want to get back on a plane.
“When they brought us down, we got on a bus and we were told they were going to try to fix the plane.
“We were like, ‘No chance! No matter what you do to it, we’re not getting on that’.
“I wanted to get here, but I didn’t want to fly. I would have taken a coach ride back to Sunderland at that point.
“But we got here fine in the end, and it’s a beautiful place, so that’s a consolation.”
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