Delta pilot leaves note in stored plane before pandemic; 400+ days later it’s a time capsule
He thought it would be for a two-week quarantine. But the note a pilot jotted and left in the cockpit of a Delta airliner in March 2020 as the pandemic started to envelop the world would not be found for more than a year.
First Officer Chris Dennis was parking it in the California desert at a storage facility that looked like a temporary airplane graveyard, with planes lined up, stretching into the distance. The sight was surreal.
“When we got in line, it looked like an optical illusion. It just kept going and going,” he said in Delta’s statement. “I don’t know how to describe it – it was shocking.”
Now the note that the sight inspired him to write is being dubbed a time capsule, capturing as it does the uncertainty and foreboding of the coronavirus pandemic’s early days.
“Hey pilots – It’s March 23rd and we just arrived from MSP,” Dennis wrote in the note, which Delta posted on Facebook. “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!”
That note would not be read for 435 days, when First Officer Nick Perez arrived at the storage facility on June 1 to get the plane ready for the skies again and found the note on the flight deck, tucked away on a tray table, Delta said in a statement.
Dennis also posted on Facebook at the time, with photos of the ghostly-looking storage facility full of grounded planes.
“Today was a day I will remember for the rest of my life,” he wrote on Facebook. “A trip opened up to bring a Delta A321 to Victorville, CA for storage. I had no idea what I would see or the emotions I would feel. Chilling, apocalyptic, surreal … all words that still don’t fit what is happening in the world. Each one of these aircraft represents hundreds of jobs, if not more.”
His post went viral as more than 4,000 people across 35 countries shared it, Delta said.
Reading the handwritten note, Perez was flung back 14 months to the beginning of that fateful “tunnel.”
“He had to have been thinking he was leaving his job,” Perez said in Delta’s statement. “Back in March, I was 100% certain I was going to lose my job.”
Now, with vaccines available and travel increasing, planes are once again taking to the skies – including this one.
