A note left by a pilot on a plane that hasn’t flown since last spring is a poignant look back to the beginning of the pandemic.
Last March, Captain Chris Dennis parked Delta ship 3009 at Victorville Airport in the California desert. Like many of us, he imagined this would just be a two-week lockdown before the world opened up again. He had no idea that plane wouldn’t take to the air again for another 435 days.
Dennis wrote, “Hey pilots—It’s March 23rd and we just arrived from MSP (Minneapolis-St. Paul). Very chilling to see so much of our fleet here in the desert. If you are here to pick it up then the light must be at the end of the tunnel. Amazing how fast it changed. Have a safe flight bringing it out of storage!”
The pilot assigned to ‘wake up’ the aircraft more than a year later found the note tucked away on a tray table in the flight deck.
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“Those 57 words, which captured so much of the uncertainty and emotion we all felt in March 2020, underscored the gravity of the trip, and how optimistic he now feels about the direction we’re heading in,” Delta posted in their Facebook post sharing the note. “Ship 3009 is now prepared to take the skies once again.”
“While the world certainly has changed over the past year, one thing is for certain: we won’t be taking that open runway for granted anytime soon.”
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