Question about travel to and from the island

1.) Naomi claims she parachuted from the helicopter because they hit a dangerous storm.
2.) Charlotte claims she parachuted from the helicopter because they hit a dangerous storm.
3.) Lapidus, Desmond, and Sayid hit a dangerous storm in the helicopter on their way to the freighter.

It seems the storm is a doorway between the timeline of the real world and the timeline of the island. A tear in the universe, maybe?** How come the storm can't be seen from the beach? Is it because the storm is actually in a different timeline too? That seems reasonable to me.

Daniel had previously been exposed to a lot of radiation because of his experiments at Oxford. Desmond had previously been exposed to a lot of radiation when the hatch blew up. I guess they were more likely to get time travel sickness than other people. Will Lapidus eventually get the sickness too, with all his flying back and forth? And if so, and he is the only pilot on the freighter, what then?

**This is A LOT like the Stephen King short story "The Langoliers" where a plane goes to another point in time when it passes through a freaky storm. The people who survive the journey have to figure out how to survive in this weird place undetectable from back in the real world.

Another source for this scenario is the old Twilight Zone episode where a plane passes through a time warp (making the plane shudder) and when it tries to land in New York, there are dinosaurs grazing on Manhattan. They go back up to try again, and this time when they descend they get a response from the air traffic control tower. But then they discover it's 1934 and there are no runways long enough for a jet. But they're running out of fuel . . . One of my favorite episodes. There are also several Star Trek episodes where this happens.

One thing I never understood about that episode: there is no runway long enough in 1934 for the plane to land, but there is one in prehistoric times? :-p

Quote:

Originally Posted by quizkid

Another source for this scenario is the old Twilight Zone episode where a plane passes through a time warp (making the plane shudder) and when it tries to land in New York, there are dinosaurs grazing on Manhattan. They go back up to try again, and this time when they descend they get a response from the air traffic control tower. But then they discover it's 1934 and there are no runways long enough for a jet. But they're running out of fuel . . . One of my favorite episodes. There are also several Star Trek episodes where this happens.

Quote:

Originally Posted by chickenpotpiesarehot

One thing I never understood about that episode: there is no runway long enough in 1934 for the plane to land, but there is one in prehistoric times? :-p

~~~LOL!

No, they can't land the plane in prehistoric times--they just descend close enough to Manhattan to see that there are dinosaurs. (Don't worry about whether they could really get that close to the ground--it's cool.) Then they go back up to go through the time warp again. But of course they're using up their fuel.

It seems Desmond starts to have the ability to be aware in both past and present. After getting the phone number from Penny in 1996 and calling her in 2004 from the boat you then see him back in 1996 smiling as he walks away from Penny's apartment like he knows it worked.