Story Frame 32 – My Fear of Flying Grounds a 747

Working on American Byzantine came with the opportunity to fly back and forth to Europe several times and my desire to be on location for the remaining American Byzantine shoots in Italy, Istanbul and London was solid and unwavering, despite the changes in my relationship with Martin.

There was just one problem: I was scared to fly.

This was embarrassing to me as well as the source of a lot of jokes and teasing within my family. I was the sister, daughter, and granddaughter of flying professionals. My brother had flown either F4s or F16s (I could never remember which) in the Marines. My father was a former vice president of Eastern Airlines. He’d also been the director of operations for British European Airways during the years we lived in London. My grandfather, a former advisor to Emperor Haile Selassie, had been Chairman of the Board for Ethiopian Airlines in the 1950s.

And then there was me.

I felt I had good reason for my reticence to fly, however. I’d had a handful of bad flying experiences, the worst of which was when I grounded a 747 in Switzerland – all by myself.

When I was twenty-eight, I flew to France to meet up with my Danish boyfriend and a band of forty jovial Danes for a week of skiing in the Alps. Getting there involved taking three Pam Am flights, all of which had problems, including an aborted take-off in the snow at JFK.

Sadly, my Danish boyfriend and I got along even worse than my efforts to navigate the French Alps on skis. Everything was fine during the day: the sun was shining, the scenery was beautiful, the skiing was great, and the stops for hot chocolate on the way down the slopes always a welcome treat. But in the evenings, drinking beers at a bar called the “33,” we quarreled and bickered over relationship expectations. Older than me by several years and already a father, my boyfriend wanted to hang out with other families whereas I, still in my twenties, wanted to party in the evenings with the singles.

At the end of the week, I packed up and flew from France to Switzerland where I boarded a 747 in Zurich for the flight back to New York City. Waiting for take-off, I looked out the window and noticed a large hole – larger than my arms could encircle – in the wing of the plane.

As the plane began to taxi to its take-off position, I rang the flight attendant button. When she arrived, I explained I was a nervous flyer, that I had just broken up with my boyfriend, and even though I’d had a few pre-flight Heinekens, I was concerned about the large hole in the wing.

“Is that okay?” I asked, pointing through the window. The flight attendant bent over to take a look. The polite expression on her face changed.

“Fuck!” she said, confirming my fears. “No, that’s not okay!”

I sat still in my little haze of beer, listening in as she spoke with the flight deck on an intercom behind my seat. Meanwhile, the plane continued taxiing to its take-off position. Once there, it turned to face the runway. The engines revved. I held my breath wondering what on earth would happen if we took off with a large hole in the wing.

A moment later, the engines cut back. As the plane turned back towards the airport, the captain’s voice came on over the loudspeaker with an apology and the news (to everyone but me) that a problem with the plane needed to be checked out. Once we arrived back at the gate, we were asked to disembark and wait in the terminal. I passed the time shopping, reading and having another Heineken, just to calm my nerves.

A few hours later, Pan Am announced the plane was unable to fly. We were grounded overnight in Zurich until they could book us on another flight the following day. We were asked to return to the plane, retrieve our carry-on belongings and pick up a voucher for the airport hotel.

I just grounded a 747! I thought with a weird mix of fear, surprise and, to be honest, a little satisfaction.

As we left the plane with our carry-ons, the flight attendants stood in a line by the exit doors. One of them pointed at me and remarked, “There’s the troublemaker! Thanks to her, I won’t have my date in New York tonight.”

I was shocked at her hostility. In my beery haze and now boyfriend-less state, tears filled my eyes. I made my way off the plane to find a group of five people, perhaps in their sixties, lined up in the lounge outside the exit tunnel.

It turned out they were waiting for me.

“There she is!” one of them exclaimed, pointing at me. What now?! I thought, blinking through a fresh wave of tears.

“Don’t tell me you’re mad at me, too,” I sobbed, regretting that extra beer. I seemed unable to get a grip on my emotions.

“Mad at you?!” one of them said. “Why on earth would we be mad at you? We think you just saved our lives!”

I stared at them in surprise. Melodramatic as they were, these words felt so healing compared to how I’d just been treated by the Pan Am flight attendants. Having witnessed that, the five friends had decided to take action.

“This is the woman who saved our lives!” they began shouting to the other passengers in the terminal, pointing at me, much to my embarrassment. I just wanted to slink away somewhere and pull myself together. But they had a plan.

“You’re not going to stay at the crappy airport hotel Pan Am booked us in,” one of them said. “We’re taking you downtown. You’ll stay with us at The Stork Hotel!”

“But I can’t afford that,” I protested. I’d already overspent my budget for the skiing trip.

“Don’t you worry, we’re so grateful you spoke up we’ll pay for your room,” another said. “And we’re also going to take you out somewhere nice for dinner!”

They were good to their word.

A few hours later, as I looked around at my five new friends in the lovely restaurant they’d chosen, I couldn’t believe any of what had just happened. The airlines kept our suitcases and so we were all still wearing the same clothes which, in my case, was a ski sweater and black pants. Not appropriate for a restaurant of this caliber but when my hosts explained our situation to the staff, we were invited in anyway.

As we exchanged stories and got to know one another a little over the food and wine, we discovered the son of one of the couples lived in the same small town in Pennsylvania where my mother worked. Even more improbably, he lived in the same historic building, in an apartment above my mother’s real estate offices.

What were the chances?

We pondered the weird serendipity of my mom and their son passing by one another, perhaps daily, more than four thousand miles away from where we were eating, laughing and chatting. That discovery lent a strange but sweet meant-to-be-ness to the circumstances of the disabled plane that had brought us together.

The following morning, we shared a taxi back out to the airport to board a different 747 – one we hoped didn’t have any holes in it. I found my seat and checked the wings, just to be sure. As other passengers passed by, some of them called out and asked me how the plane looked today. That would have made my father and brother roar with laughter to hear people were asking me this question – me, who knew absolutely nothing about planes.

When I eventually got home, I told my brother, Pip, what had happened. He guessed the plane may have hit a bird either on its take-off or landing in Zurich. When airplanes are taking off, he explained, the flaps on the wings help produce more lift. They also allow for a steep and more controllable angle for a plane during landing. But when the plane is on the ground, the flaps, which are not extended, would cover up any damage to the wings. It turned out there was no above wing inspection protocol for planes at the time, only an on-the-ground inspection.

At my mother’s urging, I wrote a letter to Pan Am, detailing the incident, to which I eventually received a toothless response, handwritten in pencil on a sheet of corporate stationary. Not long after, came the news that Pan Am was in precarious financial situation. They filed for bankruptcy six years later.

“What could go wrong did,” Stanley Gerwitz, Pan Am’s VP for External Affairs was quoted as saying at the time. “It was the most astonishing example of Murphy’s law in extremis.”

When I thought of the flight attendant who missed her date in New York City, I will admit to feeling just a touch of schadenfreude.

I still, however, had to deal with upcoming transatlantic flights in order to finish the filming for American Byzantine.

Fortunately, another film came to my rescue.

[photo of Kristin by cinematographer Richard Chisolm]

Coming up next … French Kissing My Way to Italy