With the help of everyone on board, an Israeli airline, El-Al, turned around one of their international planes to pick up an 11-year old cancer patient at the terminal who had been removed for missing her passport, the Daily Mail reports. When the girl came back on board, everyone cheered and many cried.
The girl, Inbar Chomsky, who was headed for a pediatric summer camp in the U.S., Camp Simcha, had been missing her passport and thus was taken off of the plane. Airline staff and fellow passengers had aided in a frantic search for the missing passport for half an hour, but had to remove the sick girl after it could not be located.
"El-Al sadly called her mother to tell her that Inbar's passport was lost and that the girl, who had been fighting illness so valiantly, would not be able to fly to Camp Simcha," Rabbi Yaakov Pinsky, director of of the Israeli branch of Chai Lifeline, told Yeshiva World News. "What a horrible experience for an 11-year old girl."
Just minutes after the plane left the gate and had taken off, the passport was then discovered in one of the backpacks of a fellow camper. What happened next, according to the Daily Mail, is virtually unheard of in our post-9/11 world.
"Planes rarely return to the gate after departing," an El-Al statement claims, but "after consulting with El-Al crew on the plane and El-Al staff at the airport the decision was made and the plane returned to pick up Inbar."
After 45 minutes of trying to convince air traffic control to let them return to the gate, the pilots were given permission to return to pick Chomsky up from the terminal.
Chomsky and others watched in disbelief as the plane returned just for her.
"The flight attendants could not believe their eyes," Elad Maimon, program director of the Israeli branch of Chai Lifeline, said to Yeshiva World News. "They told me they had never seen such a thing."
Rabbi Pinsky wrote that passengers cheered and cried, sharing in the girl's "happiness and excitement" and calling it "one of the greatest moments" he had ever witnessed.
Click here to see photos of Inbar Chomsky after happily locating her passport and arriving at Camp Simcha, as well as pictures of the excited staff that dressed up to greet the campers.
