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Miriam Herschlag

Would you have gotten on that plane?

My flight was scheduled to leave Vienna shortly after Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel
Waiting for El Al flight 364 from Vienna to Tel Aviv, October 1, 2024 (Miriam Herschlag)
Waiting for El Al flight 364 from Vienna to Tel Aviv, October 1, 2024 (Miriam Herschlag)

Perhaps you were hunkered down in your safe room or a bomb shelter or just a stairwell when the missiles from Iran lit up Israel’s skies Tuesday evening. I was in the Vienna Airport, but we were listening to the same news and getting the same alerts.

The Home Front Command’s wake-the-dead whizbangs reached me by mobile app, not only through my earphones but in faint echoes from the earphones of my fellow line mates as we waited to check in for El Al flight 364.

Or, more precisely, as we waited to find out if we would be checking in at all.

Ahead of me, four Israeli men of a certain late middle age swapped news updates, kibitzed about what the IDF was doing wrong or right, and bickered over whether a package tied to one of their suitcases was going to survive the journey.

Behind me, a young woman bopped to the beat of her own music but took off her noise-canceling earphones long enough to ask me whether she was in the right line. (Fear of waiting in the wrong line should have its own German word.)

The crowd was large, a full flight: Clearly, no one had canceled, and at least one passenger had just bought a ticket to get back home – a grandmother who reached Vienna that morning to visit her daughter but was turning around for her fourth flight in 24 hours because “I have three grandsons in the army, I can’t be out of the country right now.”

An El Al rep announced Israel’s airspace was closed for the coming hour. She’d keep us posted whenever the situation changed. Two Austrian soldiers with long firearms hovered on the side, and another pair threaded through with a bomb-sniffing shepherd.

“Does ANYONE know who that piece of luggage belongs to?” asked an El Al security person. “Did ANYONE see the person who left it over there on the chair?”

Shrugs all around. The checkered bag was now officially a suspected bomb.

“OK, everyone, leave now, head quickly to the far end of the terminal! No, don’t take your suitcase, just GO.”

We all walked quickly away, most dragging luggage along because, well, Israelis. Various clusters of passengers stopped at different points depending on their calculus of how likely the suspicious object was a bomb and their estimation of the potential blast radius if it would, in fact, explode. A gaggle of us went the full, 100-percent-bomb/wide-radius distance, all the way to the end of Terminal 3, through sliding glass doors, and down a few stairs to wait near an information desk.

There was a moment in that mini-evacuation when we were walking quickly away and passed a group of European travelers heading in the opposite direction. Should I stop and try to explain to them that they might be in danger? I keep going, reasoning that 1. by the time we’ve bridged languages to convey that information, boom! and 2. security personnel will block their way if needed. But in the space between what I already knew and what they didn’t yet know, I felt a little pop of gratitude that security personnel had our Israeli backs.

By the time my far-flung little group got the all-clear message, the line had re-formed and my free-spirited linemate had kindly tuned in to save my place. Check-in commenced and we made it to the gate through a gauntlet of airport security.

Boarding broke records for speed and efficiency – roll-on luggage was collected at the airplane door and placed below to avoid the fuss of squeezing too much into too little overhead space, and we were soon lifting off for a quiet, well-run flight.

El Al flight 364 was scheduled to leave Vienna at 9:45 pm local time (10:45 Israel time), a couple of hours after Iran fired 200 missiles at Israel. The flight took off 24 minutes late and arrived in Tel Aviv at 2:31 a.m., a mere 21 minutes past schedule.

More remarkable than the smooth flight was the fact that 300 passengers boarded the plane at all. With all seats full, it was clear that nobody had made an about-face, panicked by thoughts of meeting a missile midair or crashing due to signal jamming. The religious passengers among us may have put their trust in God, but all 300 of us put our full faith in Israeli security to safely fly us through the inky airspace of a sky that just hours earlier was lit up by the rockets’ white glare, with bombs bursting in air.

Just one year after we Israelis were betrayed by the colossal dereliction of our military and political leaders, this faith in our crew and the massive security apparatus backing them up was no small miracle.

About the Author
Opinion and Blogs editor at The Times of Israel (Cover photo needlework by Yocheved Herschlag Muffs.)