Our Return Journey: Part 3
We boarded the aircraft and were seated as usual. The aircraft was an Airbus A330-200 with 345 seats. After the usual preliminaries, we took off and began the final leg of our journey home.
Other than the announcement from the captain about the flight details and weather in Toronto, our journey was anything but ordinary
The flight attendants were masked and gloved and looked like they were prepared to deal with a medical crisis. Five days earlier, on an Air Transat flight from Portugal to Toronto, two passengers had to be met at the airport by paramedics due to the fact that they displayed symptoms of COVID-19 infection.
The announcement by the flight director was clear and focused and spelled out how this flight was different.
The first item had to do with changing seats.
Normally, changing seats on flights is discouraged. On this flight, this was not the case. Here, passengers were given the opportunity to change seats to maximize social distancing. By the time these changes were made, I realized that this flight, which I had assumed was fully booked and that did not have a single seat free, was actually operating at about 2/3 of capacity. It appeared that, if anyone wanted to have an empty seat between them and the person next to them, that was entirely possible. Aha, yes, here was social distancing, in practice at 40000 ft.
The second difference announced by the flight director was that, in terms of food and drink, only a snack package and bottled water would be provided for the duration of the flight.
I looked around the cabin and saw acceptance in the eyes of almost all the faces I scanned. I hadn't noticed before that about 1/4 of these faces were covered by masks.
The flight director continued. The washrooms at the very front of the aircraft were for the exclusive use of the flight crew. They're trying to be prepared for everything, I thought.
Finally, in a voice tinged with deep sadness, the flight director, confided that, she'd been flying for 32 years and had never had to make announcements like these and wished us all a good flight. Before she could repeat her announcements in French, the entire planeload of passengers broke out into applause.
For the next several hours the flight seemed as normal as one might expect. The snack packages were handed out as were the bottles of water. The attentive flight crew moved through the aisles, assisting people with mobility issues and stopping to give some needed attention to children who had outstripped their parents ability to respond.
Five hours into the flight, the captain came on the intercom.
"We're just approaching the coast of Newfoundland. Off to the right you can get a clear view of the coastline. Shortly we will be passing over Gander."
It just struck me and a chill when down my spine. Gander, This is the small community that, almost twenty years ago, was the key flight control centre for North Atlantic operations when the twin towers were struck and U.S. airspace was closed.
Gander, population 10000, took in 6600 stranded passengers and flight crews Residents of Gander and surrounding communities volunteered to house, feed, and entertain the travellers as part of Operation Yellow Ribbon. The hit musical, Come from Away, is a story of that period.
Come from away. That was us. We had come from away and were finally heading home!
To the right is a picture of Gander and its international airport taken through a dirty airplane window as it looked on Monday, March 23rd from 40000 feet. What a reassuring sight!
Shortly before we were to land, the flight director came on the intercom for one last time.
"I want you to know how proud I am of my team. In spite of the fact that we've all received layoff notices and the airline is suspending operation in one week, a number of them volunteered to work this flight today. A number of them are new with only a year's experience but they stepped up to volunteer when they could have done otherwise. They have no job to protect but they still chose to do what others couldn't or wouldn't do, I am very proud of them and feel honoured to have had them onboard today.
"I hope that, when this crisis has passed, we'll be here to greet you again with the smiles that cannot be seen today and with the services that you deserve and that we've been unable to deliver. We all wish you a safe journey home wherever that may be and may you make it safely through this crisis."
With that, the entire airplane broke into spontaneous applause.
Click here to read previous posts...