Have you ever narrowly missed a disaster when traveling? (vacation, reservation, airline)

[sidburn]

I flew out of Logan Airport in Boston less than a month before 9/11 and visited Chengdu only a few weeks before a major earthquake hit a nearby region. Have you ever visited a place just before or during a disaster?

[John7777]

Sort of. I once changed an airline reservation to leave a couple days later so I could go to a dental appointment. Had I not done that, I might have been standing around waiting for my bags when some bunch of idiots from Puerto Rico blew up a big bomb at LaGuardia Airport. That was back in the 1970s.

[Jkgourmet]

Not a place, but on the plane.

Flying out of Newport News, VA to Philly. Thunderstorms occurred and maybe lightening struck the plane. All I know is that the damn thing dropped like a stone, the yellow oxygen masks fell out fo the ceiling, and the episode was on page 23 on the NYTimes the next day.

I was flying 'drunk on a plane' for the next 8 years until I finally dealt with the phobia.

[DR2012]

Originally Posted by Jkgourmet

Not a place, but on the plane.

Flying out of Newport News, VA to Philly. Thunderstorms occurred and maybe lightening struck the plane. All I know is that the damn thing dropped like a stone, the yellow oxygen masks fell out fo the ceiling, and the episode was on page 23 on the NYTimes the next day.

I was flying 'drunk on a plane' for the next 8 years until I finally dealt with the phobia.

I don't think I could have handled that!

[Alaskan Mutt]

Probably my closest call was I was on a flight that did a fuel stop at Benghazi, Libya the day before the uprising started there.

[WellShoneMoon]

We spent the first week of September 2001 visiting New York City, including stopping in at the World Trade Center.

[myrc60]

We missed the 1989 October San Francisco earthquake that was broadcast during the World Series by exactly 1 week. If our daughter had been born one week later, we would have been right in the middle of the aftermath of that earthquake.

On the way out of town for summer vacation one year, we narrowly missed being involved in a fatal traffic accident at 60 mph. I had noticed this car entering the expressway just ahead of us and they seemed to be out of control. Mere seconds later we managed to sneak through as this car hit the left barrier and was instantly thrown across 3 lanes of traffic smacking into the barrier on the right. We quickly decided to get out of there. Our young kids did not need to see the gore that I saw as we passed that car as traffic behind us came to a screeching halt. How we did not get entangled in that accident is beyond my imagination.

[jtur88]

Nope. None that I can think of. I've been in at least two ferry boats that sank a few years later.

The oddest such coincidence was that I knew two people,, one of them quite well, who were very close friends of each other, who were both killed 58 days apart in separate commercial airline crashes. One of them would have been the daughter of the other, who was a stewardess, but she had swapped shifts with a friend and was not on the flight that crashed. So she lost both a close friend and colleague, and her father, in two separate crashes in less than two months, and that narrowly escaped death herself. It makes one realize that it can happen to anyone.

[TXNGL]

I'm not sure. Not quite the same kind of incident mentioned, but I was flying into Boston once and we had almost landed when the pilot, I guess, didn't like how we were coming in and went back up. That was the strangest feeling. I've been in airplanes from the time I was a baby and had never had that happen. I've been in several emergency landings, but never anything like that.

[Gcs15]

I was traveling in Europe back in 05. I spent time visiting six different counties. The last one I ended up at was England. I was bouncing between English cities and was due in London the next day, when the Tube bombings happened. Couldn't believe it. And day difference and everything could have changed.