Flight 823: The Vanishing Route

By Bineet Dwivedy

The flight was supposed to be simple.

IndiSky Airways Flight 823 had taken off from Mumbai, headed to Paris, on the crisp night of September 18, 2025. It carried businessmen, students, families, and wanderers—all with plans, with futures, with destinations.

At 11:45 PM, the Boeing 787 lifted into the sky. The engines purred steadily. Everything seemed normal.

Until it wasn’t.

At 12:37 AM, turbulence struck with violent force. Not the kind that made passengers clutch their seats, but the kind that felt alive, an invisible force rattling the plane like it was trying to shake them loose. The oxygen masks dropped suddenly, even though there was no reason for cabin pressure to dip.

Captain Raghav Mehta, a man who had flown through countless storms, tightened his grip on the controls. His co-pilot, Mia Roberts, shot him a glance—her fingers hovering over the navigation screen.

"Something’s wrong."

Outside the windows, the stars flickered, warping, stretching into twisted patterns that no human eyes had ever seen. The sky darkened unnaturally—too fast.

Then, all at once, the radios went dead.

They had lost contact. No response. No signals. Flight 823 had been swallowed by silence.

Passengers whispered nervously. Flight attendants clutched their arms, their eyes darting between one another.

"Where are we?" Mia muttered, staring at the navigation system. It flashed coordinates that were impossible—shifting rapidly, displaying places that didn’t exist.

Then, as suddenly as the chaos had begun, the turbulence ceased.

The passengers exhaled in relief. The whispering stopped. The silence was too perfect.

And then—through the frozen clouds—the wrong sunrise appeared.

Blood-red. Low on the horizon.

And beneath it—an unfamiliar land.

The airport below was not in Paris.

The flight descended. The wheels touched solid ground.

And the passengers of Flight 823 stared in horror.

They had landed in Damascus, Syria.

Terror struck instantly.

Passengers demanded answers, their voices tangled in confusion and panic. How had they ended up here? How had the plane—a direct flight to Paris—landed thousands of miles off course?

The airport officials rushed forward, equally stunned.

"Your flight doesn’t exist," the Syrian Air Marshal stated, staring at the flight records. "Flight 823 isn’t registered. It wasn’t supposed to take off tonight."

The passengers fell silent.

Then, someone screamed.

They turned—to find a flight attendant standing near the cockpit door, her mouth frozen open, her skin ashen.

"Captain Mehta is gone."

The cockpit was empty. The controls flickered with static. The pilot’s seat—still warm—sat abandoned.

And then, the airport lights flickered.

Outside the windows, the red sunrise deepened, stretching like an open wound across the sky.

And something was watching.

Mia Roberts had never believed in ghosts.

But something about the past hour had shattered every certainty she ever had about reality.

The passengers were locked in a state of absolute fear. Airport officials attempted communication with the airline, with Mumbai’s control tower.

Nothing worked.

There was no record of Flight 823.

"We need to leave," Mia whispered, staring into the horizon, where the sun hadn’t moved. Frozen in time.

A low vibration thrummed beneath their feet.

Passengers grabbed onto anything solid, fearing another shockwave—but there was no turbulence.

Then the airport speakers crackled.

A single phrase whispered through them.

"Board the plane."

The voice was not human.

No one moved. No one breathed.

Then, Priya, one of the flight attendants who had not spoken since the landing, stood up.

"We have to board now."

Her voice was not hers.

She started toward the plane, moving too smoothly, her feet barely touching the ground. And then, one by one, the passengers followed—silently, obediently, like puppets pulled by unseen strings.

Mia watched in horror.

This was not right.

She knew, somehow, that they could not stay.

The only way to live was to leave.

But leave where?

The pilots were missing. The navigation had failed. The controls were possessed by something unknown.

Yet still—the passengers stepped onto the plane.

Mia’s pulse hammered in her throat.

She could not resist it.

The moment the last passenger stepped onto the plane, the airport disappeared.

Not gradually. Not softly.

It blinked out of existence.

Then, the sky turned black.

Not night—emptiness.

The seatbelt signs flickered on.

A hum—low, vibrating, pulsing like a heartbeat—thumped through the walls of the aircraft.

Then the plane lifted off, moving with an impossible smoothness, faster than physics allowed.

And then—everything went white.

The next thing they knew, they were landing.

It was Mumbai.

The airport officials stared in shock.

The passengers tumbled out of the plane, gasping, shaking, alive.

Captain Mehta was standing beside them.

Mia turned—to see his uniform neatly pressed, his eyes calm.

"Where have you been?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

Mehta smiled.

"Flying," he said simply.

And then, without another word—he disappeared.

No official record of Flight 823 remained.

No logs. No radio signals.

The passengers had returned—but they carried no memory of the hours between their arrival and their escape.

But they knew one thing.

Something had happened up there.

And it wasn’t finished.

By Bineet Dwivedy