Working on Christmas can be frustrating when you have to spend time apart from family and friends. But one father went above and beyond (literally) to make sure he could be with his working daughter during the holidays.
Pierce Vaughan is a flight attendant for Delta and was scheduled to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. So her father, Hal, decided he would spend the holiday in the sky with her.
The pair flew together from New Orleans to Detroit, and then Vaughan worked three flights where her dad was a passenger from Detroit to Fort Myers, back to Detroit, and then to Hartford.
Fellow passenger Mike Levy captured the special moment and shared it in a post on Facebook that eventually went viral. Levy said he was sitting next to Hal during one of their flights to Detroit when he heard their story.
“What a fantastic father!” Levy said in his post.
It was the first time Hal flew on one of his daughter's flight, Vaughan said in an interview. Back when she graduated as a flight attendant, he was the one to pin the wings on her uniform. But a few months after she started working, he broke his neck, and there was a possibility that he would never be able to walk again.
But after months of physical therapy, Hal gained his mobility back and was able to travel with his daughter.
"I’d just never been without my parents on Christmas, so my mom took one for the team and stayed home with all of the pets so he could take his first trip since the accident with me," Vaughan said.
Her dad was able to fly standby for free because he is a flight attendant's parent, but he would only be allowed on if there was an empty seat on the plane. In what may have been a Christmas miracle, there was an extra seat on every flight for her dad, and he even got a first class seat.
In a post on Facebook, Vaughan also thanked the “patient, wonderful gate agents around the country and my perfect crew” for helping make it all happen.