Man films inside cabin during terrifying emergency landing and people are amazed by his reaction

We've all seen the safety booklets and listened to the briefings from flight attendants at the beginning of journeys, but few of us have ever been involved in an actual emergency landing while traveling by plane.

It's an experience no one would actually want to have, but it was thrust upon British tourist Ethan Williams when his flight CX884 from Hong Kong to Los Angeles started to descend over Alaska in July 2015.

The plane was forced into an emergency landing, as was announced over the tannoy, and Williams made the unique decision to vlog the experience.

He later said, when interviewed by CNN, that doing so basically helped him to distract himself from the reality of what was happening.

In his videos you can see everyone in the plane's cabin wearing the bright yellow life jackets from under their seats, with most people looking understandably pretty shaken about what's happening.

Passengers are instructed they might have to get into a bracing position, and warned that the plane might have to make a water landing.

However, the one tannoy announcement everyone wanted to hear then came through from the pilot, who tells their passengers that despite their worst fears, they now anticipate a "normal landing" when they reach an airstrip.

Williams punches the air in relief at this, although the process still isn't full over by this point. He later narrates to the camera in almost complete darkness, with the cabin lights off, and describes how the plane was jettisoning fuel in order to make itself lighter.

The flight eventually landed on a military base in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, which is hardly where you want to end up if you're on your way to LA.

Still, compared to the alternative of a landing in the middle of nowhere or in the ocean, everyone on board doubtless was thrilled to just be on safe ground.

Daniel Garrido / Getty

Williams' final clip is still very dark, as he confirms that the plane has landed, but you can quite easily hear the applause from the cabin as people celebrate in relief the fact that they've made it through alive.

In a statement after the incident, Cathay Pacific said 'a preliminary inspection indicates that an equipment cooling fan situated below the cabin floor near the forward cargo compartment had failed'. Smoke was detected around the cockpit area, meaning the pilot decided to make this precautionary diversion - but Williams did manage to end up in LA. He later posted a photo of a letter from Cathay Pacific, which offered him "our most sincere apologies for the inconveniece you have experienced", along with a cash card worth $300.

It's a pretty stunning set of clips, and has garnered plenty of reactions from YouTube comments, where people have been amazed at how calm Williams appeared on the surface of things.

One person wrote: "Dude youre so calm that you should be a flight attendant," and a second agreed: "You were a lot calmer than I would have been!"

While another joked: "The only time clapping for the landing is permissible."