My mother recently told me a shocking story. She said she’d told me before, but I don’t think she ever did.
A few days before my first birthday, she and I were going to fly to Florida to visit my grandparents. We lived in West Virginia at the time, and the 10:00am flight was to leave out of National Airport. The weather was absolutely terrible – one of the area’s worst blizzards in recent memory. Traffic, of course, crawled along at a snail’s pace, which made my mother certain we would miss the flight. Before we left home she talked to the airline and asked what she should do if we missed the flight. The customer service representative told her not to worry, there was another flight a few hours later, around 2:00pm. So she put the baby (that is, me) in the car and headed off to the airport. She managed to get there just in the nick of time – dragging bags and a twelve-month-old, she hustled onto the plane at the last possible moment before they closed the doors.
I’m going to pause in the story now to see if you can figure out where I’m going with this. Follow these facts:
- This was January 13, 1982.
- We were leaving from Washington’s National Airport.
- Our destination was Florida.
- We took the earlier of two flights that day.
Don’t worry if you can’t put this all together, you’d have to be a specific sort of geek to figure it out. An airplane disaster geek, specifically.
My mother and I barely missed being on Air Florida Flight 90, which crashed into the 14th Street Bridge within minutes of takeoff.
The reason this is so shocking is that I’d read about the disaster of “Palm 90″ before. I knew more or less what had happened, including the fact that ground transportation was in terrible shape and that more than seventy people were killed in the crash. I even knew that one passenger gave his life to save five others. But I had no idea that I was almost on the flight. If we had arrived at the airport ten minutes later, my mother has told me, we would have missed the morning flight and boarded Palm 90 a few hours later. I haven’t found any reports of very small children having been on board, so if we had been on the flight I’m sure the story of “the young mother and her baby girl” would have made it into the movie about the crash. In an age where plane crashes happen frequently, change the world, and fascinate thousands, I can’t believe I was very nearly involved in one.
by Sunny
15 Nov 2002 at 17:09
Well, “the last possible moment” is just a bit of an exaggeration, but not a lot — it was fairly close. As you said, if we’d arrived at the airport ten minutes later, we wouldn’t have made it.
At the time, not being clairvoyant, my main motivation to make I didn’t miss that morning flight was the prospect of being stranded in an airport for five hours with a 12-month-old baby who was never easy to manage — due, of course, to having ADHD, but I wouldn’t know that for another six and a half years. (I still look with awe at laid-back babies who just lie quietly and patiently in their parents’ arms and gaze calmly at whatever’s in front of them — I saw a baby do that a couple of weeks ago at a large, noisy party and was, as always, amazed, especially when I saw him later, still in his front pack, fast asleep.) You were never calm and relaxed, and I could just picture what it would be like to be stuck there all day with a baby who needed constant action and stimulation, but would then get overstimulated and overtired and need a nap, but who would only nap under the calmest and quietest of circumstances. And then I would still have another two hours on a plane without even the ability to walk around with you (often the only thing that kept you calm)? No, I had to make that flight! Thank goodness I did!!
The end of the story is that we flew uneventfully to our destination and were picked up by Grandma and Grandpa and went back to their house — but we couldn’t have a decent conversation because the phone was ringing off the hook. Every few minutes someone else would call Grandma and ask, “Is everything okay?” “Did your daughter get there all right?” “Did your grandchild come today?” and things like that. I was amazed at Grandma’s popularity … I knew she would have told everyone she knew that her daughter and her granddaughter were coming to visit, but I was surprised that she was getting so many calls.
Something about the paradoxical ethos of “not bothering” people, even in the midst of the gossip mill and busybody heaven that retirement communities become, kept most of the callers from mentioning why they had called. “Oh good,” they’d say when Grandma told them we’d arrived just fine, “I’m glad they got there okay. See you later. Bye.”
Grandma was puzzled at the volume of calls too. It wasn’t until someone finally told us what had happened and suggested we turn on the television that we understood what was going on. Then she realized that she had indeed told everyone that her daughter and grandbaby were coming that day on an Air Florida flight from Washington — but of course hadn’t specified which Air Florida flight — and everyone who knew her was terrified that her daughter and her only grandchild were dying in an icy river.
*shudder*
*hugging you tight*
by terry
25 Feb 2003 at 15:12
I was in visiting DC the second week in January ’82 to see if there were any clerkships available on Capitol Hill. I was scheduled to leave on the 13th to visit my parents in Florida. I got two-thirds of the way to the airport when I realized I left my briefcase back at the hotel. I told the cabbie to turn around…knowing I would miss my flight. I found my briefcase just find…but as I was making a call to the airlines from the lobby a breaking news story came on the tv…Flight 90 had crashed into the Potomac…my flight. My briefcase and my forgetfulness had caused me to miss the flight.