If there’s one thing you can say about Americans, it’s that some of us are not particularly nice nowadays. Self-centeredness – someone’s needs and wants, even at the expense of others – seems to be at an all-time high. And if they’re not just thinking about themselves, people are so interested in pointing fingers at those on the other side of the political fence that they seem to forget that “those people” are real, live human beings with lives and feelings and things that are important to them, too.
It’s gotten to the point where, if you were to read that a bunch of people – total strangers, no less – did something nice for someone else, it’d be almost impossible to believe. Which is why, when this post came up on social media a couple of weeks ago, there was a debate if it actually even happened.
Some of the responses to it were:
- Hope it’s true but doubt it since people suck.
- What a lovely made up story.
- I highly doubt this is true. People will not care about him and his daughter unfortunately they will all stand up when the plane stops regardless.
- Definitely not in America.
- So unbelievable that it could have been written by Disney. Did the man have a talking animal with him , or a household appliance that could sing and dance?
- On today’s episode of,” things that never happened….”
Although there were some people who thought it was possible:
- It does happen..seen it happen more than once…mostly midwest flights, midwest people are generally nicer to us and their fellow passengers
- It happens. Good for the flight attendants!
- I was on a flight where they had about 10 people connecting to the same flight get off first. No one complained.
- Yep. As a flight attendant, things like this do happen. Not always. But sometimes.
- I believe it people aren’t all bad.
So, did it happen? Did it not? Would an entire flight of people really wait for one man, in the back row, no less, to get off so he could catch his connecting flight and make it to his twin girls’ first father-daughter dance?
Just for fun, and because I enjoy searching out stories, I decided to see if I could find this one. And guess what? It really DID happen.
The dad in question was Mike Good, a frequent flyer from Davidson, NC. He was on an American Airlines flight that was going from Nashville to Charlotte, just before Valentine’s Day. The flight is typically short, but there had been thunderstorms in the Charlotte area that day so all incoming flights had been cancelled or delayed.
The airline had tried to get him onto an earlier flight and wound up losing his originally assigned seat in the process. That’s how he wound up in the very last row of the plane.
“I was still able to board early, so I got to talking to the flight attendant in the back and I told her I was going to be in the doghouse because I was going to miss my kids’ dance,” Good told social media at the time.
His girls, 7-year-old twins Lucy and Emily, were waiting at home with their mom. With his plane so late, the Plan B was that the girls’ mom would take them to the dance.
“I was sure there was no way I was going to make it,” Good recalls. “I knew it would take me thirty minutes to get off the plane and then I had about a thirty minute drive from the airport.”
Unfortunately, the plane was forced to circle the airport before landing when they got to Charlotte. That delayed the flight even further, but as they started the final taxi up to the gate, the flight attendant made an announcement: “She told everyone there was a dad in the last row trying to make his twins’ father-daughter dance and we’d really appreciate it if you’d let him off the plane so he can get there.”
And they did. {{{THUD}}}
“I grabbed my bag, ran down the aisle and thanked everybody. I was wishing everyone a happy Valentine’s Day as I ran down the aisle,” he says.
He made it to the dance at 7:50pm, surprising his wife and daughters.
At the time, the story went viral, which is how author Jenny Hale wound up posting about it.
Good says the flight attendant was the real hero in this story: “I never asked to get off early. It was the flight crew who made that happen and that’s who I’m appreciative of. And the passengers, that was amazing to see everybody just sitting on the plane.”
Here’s a local news report about the story:
And yes, as you may have seen, this story happened in February 2020. Just before Covid. Just before people seemingly lost their minds about “us” and “them.”
But he made that dance!
Could it happen today?
Could something like this happen today? What do you think?
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