The Absent Uncle: Déjà vu or something similar

I, along with much of America, was spending a Wednesday evening winding down. And then, a newsbreak – a commercial flight heading to Washington, D.C.’s Reagan International had collided with a helicopter and both aircraft had crashed into the Potomac River.

Details were at first sketchy but in a short period of time the facts of a smaller regional jet flown by American Airlines from Wichita, Kan., had crashed with an Army Helicopter, and as events were eventually reported, all 67 people involved in this tragedy had perished.

Frankly, I was stunned. I think I just couldn’t imagine what both the unfortunate people on the flight or the helicopter felt; the terror they must have experienced at that moment. And then the aftermath; the notifications, the pain of the loved ones of those who perished. Absolute anguish.

For quite a few years I was a regular flyer in and out of that Wichita airport. Most times flying on American Airlines regional jet with 60 or so other passengers.

Don’t get me wrong, just because this was a smaller airplane doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened with an airplane with 150 or 300 people aboard.   

I was never a completely relaxed flier – but when you do it (it seemed like continually) a lot you become a person that takes you are going to get where you are going, for granted.

While I also flew on larger planes, the smaller planes always felt more intimate. On this particular model, like in the crash, the seating arrangement was in the front three to four rows a 1 by 2 (in my parlance), that is on the left side a single seat, on the right two seats side by side. I always wanted to have my single seat, up front, left side. Elbow room for both elbows. Because of my frequent flyer status, I most usually got what I preferred.

Besides being smaller, which created a bit more relaxed atmosphere for all, those flights also allowed the crew to be a bit less stiff and friendlier – not all of them – but more than you would find on the larger planes and they seemed to care and just be people trying to make you comfortable.

Maybe this is what PTSD is all about. Memories of hundreds of late-night flights (getting back to Wichita for the most part) flooded into my thoughts. Good people, kind people, people you never wanted to see again, late and delayed flights, restroom out of order flights, tired as the dickens and irritable, too many packs of crackers and pretzels, long waits for luggage, and for me – all safely completed flights.

But not tonight for those folks or their loved ones. Just devastating.