3/28/2024 0 Comments England keep calm and carry onDepending upon ages, obligations, commitments and conditions, a huge spectrum of human emotion was displayed. Some people took to yelling (which made me think about Jill Taylor’s Character 2 fear-based response), others, like my husband, took to rebooking and strategizing next steps (think Character 1 and the “fix it” mentality), others, like me, took to finding Prosecco (it seemed like we should at least enjoy ourselves, Character 3 in high relief), and many, many of us took to sleeping amidst strangers on the floor of the airport, nary a worry about our safety, focused instead on a solitary sense of being with and needing one another, all having the same common goal. It became an experiment in tolerance and coping mechanisms. Having landed safely, we initially all occupied a space of enormous gratitude, and made the best of the food and drink available to us (we were, after all, in Venice… so at least prosciutto and Prosecco were readily available!). However, over the course of the next many hours, emotions and attitudes changed. Jill Bolte Taylor’s Whole Brain Living In Action Little did we know then that it would be 4:30am before a plane would arrive to continue us on our original flight path. And more specifically, we would not be allowed to leave Gate 62 other than to get food with our vouchers from the one open restaurant. and that we would soon be given further instructions.Īs England is no longer part of the EU, we soon learned that Italian authorities had decided that British Air would not be allowed to let us back onto the plane if we were to leave the airport. Aaron chuckled: “It won’t be. This is going to be a long afternoon.” About twenty minutes later, we were told to disembark. Then, as fire engines and firefighters surrounded the plane, the pilot announced that they’d be checking the plane to see if it would be safe for us to continue on our journey. Passengers erupted in applause when we landed safely on the tarmac. Visions of Gondolas soon appeared in my mind. If you have to be diverted, Venice sounds like a lovely place to go. We’re going to be diverted.”Ībout a minute later, the pilot came onto the loudspeaker, telling all passengers and flight attendants to take their seats as we were having some technical difficulties and would be descending quickly to make an urgent landing in Venice.Īaron epitomized the old British ethos to “Keep Calm and Carry On”. He then said “There’s no way we’re flying to London, though. He told me that as his father was head of engineering for another large airline, over the years, he’d learned a bit about planes, and their ability to fly on only one engine. I told him he seemed awfully calm considering what he was saying and the fact that he was mid-flight with his young family. He followed up with “Did you see that flame?” Soon after take-off Avery and I began an all-consuming game of “throw the pretzel in the cup”.Īfter flying for about forty-five minutes, Aaron asked me if I’d heard ”that sound”? Aaron was seated in the aisle seat across from his wife, who was holding Elizabeth, their other twenty-month old daughter. Having boarded our flight from Dubrovnik to London for a connecting flight to Boston, I took my seat between my husband and Aaron, a young British father holding Avery, his twenty-month old daughter.
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