Can you imagine what it must have been like on board that Air France aeroplane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean last month? Rather dreadfully, I can.

Admittedly, my first plane crash was a rather minor affair. The Vietnamese pilot had had several attempts to land the country’s only jet, and I sort of knew as we bumped towards the runway for the fourth that it wouldn’t go well. And it didn’t. We ended up in a field.

The second crash was in Libya. Or Chad. Or possibly Mali. The pilot wasn’t really sure where we were and, as it turned out, nor did he have any idea how to land. Because he was a bit drunk. Weirdly, he managed to get the nose wheel down first, and because it’s not really designed for that, it snapped off, meaning we skidded in a sparky, bouncy sort of way through the Sahara for a while.

The third was not actually a crash. But it was by far the most terrifying, because it really did look for several minutes like there could be no other outcome.

I had boarded a small, windowless 12-seater on an island off Cuba for a short flight to Havana. The plane had been built by the Russians at some point in the 1950s and then used by the Angolan air force throughout the Seventies and Eighties before it eventually arrived in Cuba as a city hopper. Judging by the amount of oil that streaked along the wings and the smoke that belched from the Lada engines when they coughed into life, it had been built by people who couldn’t care less and serviced by no one, ever.

Shortly after takeoff the entire cabin filled with steam, which meant the pilots were unable to see the large thunderstorm that lay ahead. So they flew right into it. And moments later we were upside down. I want you to think how that might feel for a moment . . .

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.

Happily, I didn’t think about that because the other thing you might not have considered is the cooling system on a 1950s ex-Angolan air force aeroplane.

What you get above each seat is a small Pifco fan, and because I was upside down, hanging by my seatbelt, the top of my head was actually in the blades. It was very uncomfy, having a haircut while the wrong way up, in a tropical thunderstorm and knowing that if the pilot regained control, I’d be getting a brown shower.

I turned at one point to a colleague who was sitting in the next seat, having a lovely Oh Brother Nimmo monk cut, and asked, because he had a pilot’s licence, if we were in trouble. The white knuckled “yes” was enough.

How did it feel? Pretty awful, if I’m honest. Because I didn’t know whether the impact was one minute or one second away, it was impossible to brace or get my breathing right. It’s like knowing you’re going to be punched but not when.

I do remember thinking, though, that it would be quite a cool way to go. Better, I thought, to scream through the pearly gates in a Russian plane over Cuba than with a tube up my nose and a grey face.

And then, obviously, the story has a boring ending because the pilot did regain control and we did land safely and I wasn’t killed. Or covered in shit.

Which brings me back to those poor souls on board the Air France jet that didn’t land safely. Last week, experts managed to work out that it did not break up in mid-air, which would have killed everyone instantly — one minute you’d have been snuggling into Russell Crowe with a glass of red and the next, you’d have been dead. Instead, it remained intact until it hit the sea. Which meant that those passengers had to sit there, for several minutes, knowing they were on a high-speed one-way ticket into oblivion. And what makes it even more poignant for me than that is that one of them was a friend of mine.

I imagine that being told by a doctor you have three months to live is scary. I imagine, too, that being burned at the stake is bad. Or beheaded on the internet. But surely, the worst is being on a plane, over the middle of an ocean, pointing downwards and doing about 750mph.

I know that I lived and I know that last week a 14-year-old girl escaped almost unharmed from another Airbus tragedy in the Indian Ocean. But really, when a plane falls out of the sky, your chances are not even slim. And worst of all, you are jammed in a seat, unable to do a damn thing about it.

With cancer, you think that if you only eat nuts and read the Bible a lot, you might pull through. In a car, you can take avoiding action as the lamppost looms. But in a plane, you are impotent.

And that’s what brings me on to this morning’s bright idea. At present, all passengers are given a life jacket even though they know they may as well have been given a piece of birthday cake or a pack of playing cards. I think I’m right in saying that in all of civil aviation history, not one life has ever been saved by the whistle, the torch or the toggles.

So why not give everyone a parachute instead? Of course, most passengers would be too paralysed with fear in a real emergency to put it on properly. Even if they had been listening to the safety briefing. But here’s the thing. As the plane screamed downwards, you would at least have something to do. Finding it, reading the instructions, making your way to the door, working out how it can be turned to manual and so on. This would give people hope. Which is so much better than the horrific alternative: despair.

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