On Saint Patrick’s Day 1970, Eastern Air Lines shuttle Flight 1320 left Newark for Boston with 68 passengers and five crew. Fares were paid in the air. Near Boston, a young man with a revolver walked into the cockpit and told the captain to fly east, out over the ocean.
He shot both pilots. The copilot was fatally wounded. The captain, 35, bleeding from both arms, flew the plane back and landed it at Logan Airport, according to The Boston Globe’s 2020 reconstruction. Everyone else on board survived.
One of the passengers, by her own account, was 19.
In 2009 came the “Miracle on the Hudson,” Captain Sully Sullenberger’s landing on the Hudson. It set her thinking, she later wrote, about how miraculous her own flight had been. She had never thanked the pilot or the crew.
At the time she was reading Making It All Work, a 2008 book by David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done. She asked herself the question Allen teaches: what’s the next action? By her account, the answer was “Sit down at the computer.”
She did. She searched for retired Eastern Airlines pilots, and within the hour she had the captain’s name and address. Another retired pilot, interested in the story, told her much more about the flight, especially about the copilot who died. She wrote the captain a letter.
By her account, he was in his seventies by then and living in Florida. When the letter arrived, she wrote, his wife told him he should sit down and write a nice letter back. He decided to call instead.
She wrote her update to Allen the day after the flight’s 39th anniversary. The call, she wrote, was “the first time in 39 years I had ever spoken to someone who shared the experience of that flight.” She told him what had happened in the cabin. He told her about the gunfight in the cockpit. Most of the call, by her account, was him asking about her life and her children.
Allen’s company published her letter on its website in May 2009, under the headline “The power of asking, ‘What’s the next action?’” It is one reader’s story, chosen by the company that teaches the method.
Eleven years later, the Globe reported the same outline: after the Miracle on the Hudson, she had tracked the captain down to thank him. She had also found other passengers. One of them, by then 96, still talked with her every Saint Patrick’s Day.