I think it’s called a delayed panic reaction.
I flew with a colleague to Savannah last week to do some business with Marine Corps Community Services. We flew out of State College airport into Detroit and then had a straight shot to Savannah Georgia. MCRD (Marine Corps Recruit Depot) Parris Island and the MCAS (Marine Corps Air Station) Beaufort are about 30 minutes from the Savannah airport over the border into South Carolina.
I’m not the most comfortable flier. Unfortunately, flying is one of the necessary evils of doing business. Unless you are Aretha Franklin or John Madden, both of whom reportedly refuse to fly and travel to their professional gigs via some form of ground transportation, many of us have fly for work or because we want to get to that fun location.
I spend a lot of time on planes watching the flight attendants. They come to work and perform their duties with comfort and ease above the clouds every day in the same manner that I work in my office and classroom on campus. I figure if they can do it, I can do it.
As I settled in for the last leg of our trip to Savannah, I noted my colleague was seated in another row. I was seated a little further back in the plane, next to a guy I will call Draw String Pants. I’m the kind of flyer who smiles at the person sitting next to me, I offer a greeting and then I pull out my book or magazine.
Because of my anxiety, I’m not big on airplane chit-chat. My seatmate came in wearing sandals, carrying a backpack full of fruit and donning a pair of linen draw string pants and matching linen shirt.
After a smooth take-off and otherwise uneventful start to our flight, the attendants started the beverage service. We learned that the young man offering us soda and those wonderful ginger cookies had only been on the job for five weeks.
As he was pouring a glass of ice water for Draw String Pants, we were rocked with some turbulence. It wasn’t the worst turbulence that I’ve ever experienced and it only lasted a couple of minutes. (When I thought Draw String Pants wasn’t looking, I reached into my bag and slipped a physician prescribed “helper” in my mouth and quickly rinsed it down with the Zero Water I brought with me).
Busted. “Oh, you’re nervous” he said. “I can help you out by talking.” I smiled awkwardly. Draw String Pants then began to share with me his life story. He talked. I nodded. He talked. I waited for the drugs to kick in. We were just getting to his break up with his high school girlfriend when the pilot came on over the announcements.
“There has been a slight problem. It has become necessary for us to divert to Greenville-Spartanburg SC for an emergency landing. The windshield of the plane has cracked. We don’t believe that we are at risk and we think we will have no problem keeping the cabin pressurized but, just to be sure, we have been cleared to land in Greenville.”
I immediately looked up at the two flight attendants, including the new guy, to try to read their reactions and look for stress. Both seemed to be carrying on as if nothing happened.
I turned to Draw String Pants and said “I guess this is no big deal.” He said “Great! Now where was I? Oh yeah … my high school girlfriend … “
We landed in Greenville about 20 minutes later.
As we got off the plane in Greenville, we were greeted by representatives from Delta Airlines who offered us snacks and bottles of water. The first set of instructions indicated that a new plane was coming in right behind us and would take us the rest of the way to Savannah.
A short time later, they came back with a new announcement and said the emergency plane had a “part issue” so they were going to switch up the part from the cracked windshield plane and have us going in no time.
While we were waiting, Draw String Pants found himself a Rum and Coke.
A few minutes later, we were each called to the desk at the gate and handed $50 vouchers for future use with Delta. In the meantime, our two flight attendants came out to wait with the rest of us. One of them showed us a picture of the shattered windshield. It looked like those windshields in the crash car accidents that they show on TV.
The whole experience was fascinating. The passengers from on our plane gathered around the one area of the Greenville airport and were soon laughing and talking to each other. Our shared experience served to bond us. More importantly, no one was rude, angry or impatient. Everyone seemed to take the incident in stride.
In under an hour, we were back in the plane and on our way to Savannah; we ended up being delayed by about two hours. Draw String Pants was able to finish his autobiography (including an extended chapter about a bullet style food mixer and his recent weight loss from his special smoothies) and my colleague and I were able to get to the hotel in time to prepare for our next two days of training.
(Our ride from the airport to our hotel, accompanied by Draw String Pants who had missed his ride and asked if he could tag along and who began referring to us as his “friends” is a lesson in hilarity and perhaps a bit of bad judgment/stranger danger but I will save that for another day.)
A cracked windshield. Questions about cabin pressure. A $50 voucher that we didn’t ask to get? I was laying in the hotel room the next night and started thinking about the what-ifs. What if the windshield had blown out? What if our crew wasn’t as skilled? What if people had panicked? Is the calm that we all experienced typical of “incidents” at 33,000 feet? A full 24 hours later I broke out into a full sweat.
Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket.
As I was getting on the plane to come home, a friend texted me and asked if I was nervous, given the events earlier in the week. I thought for a moment and responded back.
“Nope. I figure the percentages are in my favor. After all, it’s safer to fly than it is to drive.”
