Member-only story
TRAVEL
You’re Buckled into Your Seat. You’re Ready to Fly! But Your Plane Isn’t Going Anywhere
Your Airplane has a Flat
The cool thing was that the pilot of Flight 2661 was a woman.
The not-so-cool thing was that I learned this when she came on over the loudspeaker and told the passengers of Flight 2661, who were all buckled in and ready to fly from Philadelphia to San Francisco, that the plane couldn’t take off as scheduled because it had a flat tire.
Everyone would have to “deplane” so the flat could be fixed. This, she told us, would take two hours.
“Two hours! To fix a flat?” said a man behind me. “It only takes me ten minutes to fix a flat on my Subaru.”
“Your Subaru isn’t an airplane,” the woman traveling with him responded.
“I didn’t know ‘deplane’ was a word,” said the woman sitting next to me. “I guess I’ve expanded my vocabulary today. This is the first time in all my years of flying I’ve ever had to deplane.”
“You’re lucky,” I told her. “It’s happened to me several times. It happened to me a few months ago on this very flight, 2661. The plane was broken so they had to find us another plane. But that’s okay. I’m a writer and it gave me something to write about.”
