Almost Dying With 140 Other People

One thing you never want to see on a flight is live television coverage of your flight with the caption “Crippled Airplane to Attempt Emergency Landing.”

In a moment that could have only been scripted by Charlie Kaufman, that’s exactly what we saw about thirty minutes into our Jet Blue flight to New York on Wednesday afternoon.

The story of the next three hours is something with which you are no doubt familiar and we can’t add much to what you’ve already heard – the steady and skilled pilot, the sorrowful video-taped goodbyes and the repeated “brace” mantra. We’ll spare you the details of attempts to pilfer seats closer to the exit rows, the confiscation of all high heels, and the preening for interviews before the plane even landed. Let’s just say almost dying with 140 other people is a fascinating sociological experiment.

We must immediately acknowledge the heroics of our pilot in a time of emergency, which was in stark contrast to our flight attendant, who refused our request for cocktails in our time of need. Without the ability to toast our upcoming crash landing, all we could do was watch hours of MSNBC and ponder the commentators’ predictions of our fate. Robert Hager’s assessment that though he thought we would be fine, he “had never seen anything quite like this,” did cause a moment of pause. When one commentator suggested we could be watching the broadcast, but were most likely focused on preparing for the emergency landing, the entire cabin burst into laughter. One woman excitedly told us she had just moved to LA, and was thrilled to already be on television.

All in all, most on the flight remained calm, though there were a lot of tears, a lot of handholding, and spontaneous study groups dedicated to the intricacies of the safety brochure.

For us, the whole experience of waiting to explode upon landing was actually quite unremarkable. We laughed and told jokes about our upcoming funerals right through assuming the crash positions. What it taught us is that loving what you do with your life makes all the difference when you think you might soon be incinerated. Our minds were not full of regrets, but rather a sense of gratitude for having had the chance to love those closest to us and to contribute to our community. We’ve had the joyous gift of working with such role models as Rob and Michele Reiner and Maria Shriver, whose contributions, skills and values have motivated and inspired us. We debated whether to make goodbye calls, but were very pleased to realize we couldn’t think of any who didn’t already know how much they mean to us.

When it was all over, we were a little sad that we didn’t get to jump down the rubber slide, but the cookies provided by the Red Cross made us feel like true survivors. Any doubts we may have had that we came close to dying were erased by the presence of both the Mayor and the Police Chief, there to greet us as we disembarked.

We are political and media consultants who devote our time and efforts to issues we believe in. And although we aren’t shameless enough to mention our clients in this blog about our near-death experience, if we were, we’d say Parents’ Action for Children is a phenomenal organization (www.parentsaction.org). On Flight 292, we realized just how profoundly grateful we are for having the opportunity to do what we love. So much so that Jeff got up the next day, and got back on another flight for New York to produce a press conference on Friday. Upon his arrival in New York, he was greeted by a JetBlue grief counselor, bearing fruit cocktail. Not exactly the cocktail we’d had in mind, but we are getting closer.