Marco and Duccio leave the doomed flight

Marco and Duccio leave the flight that will be lost at sea after Duccio’s fear of flying erupts into a public crisis and Marco secures their removal from the aircraft. Their return to the ground seems at first like a ruined trip and an embarrassing episode; the later revelation that the plane has crashed transforms it into an escape from death, while leaving Marco as the sole person who knows how closely Duccio’s fearful warnings came to the truth.

The planned journey

Marco takes charge of arranging a trip to Ljubljana with Duccio, who is afraid of flying. The two friends had driven there the year before and won a great deal at the casino. This time Marco persuades Duccio to travel by air, spending four evenings trying to overcome his aversion. He counters it with the same rational, anti-superstitious arguments he uses against other people’s fear of the Unnameable, and believes he has succeeded.

The pair arrive at Pisa airport on a fragrant May afternoon, expecting a long weekend. Marco has found a very cheap charter flight operated by Koper Aviopromet. The journey itself is already made less straightforward by the airline’s puzzling route between Pisa and Ljubljana, but the more immediate uncertainty is Duccio’s worsening alarm as the passengers board. Marco has brought tranquilizers taken from his sister’s private pharmacy, yet they do not ease his friend’s anxiety.

Crisis aboard the aircraft

Duccio reads the worn seats and overhead compartments as signs that the aircraft has not been maintained well. More troubling to him are the passengers, whom he repeatedly regards as already dead. His fear gathers force rather than yielding to Marco’s reassurances. When he stands and calls out for a famous person among the passengers—a footballer, actor, or other notable figure—he is looking for someone whose life seems to have been favored. He then accuses the people aboard of being dead and of wanting to kill him.

Marco tries to steady Duccio and quiet the other passengers. The scene makes their difference in temperament plain: Duccio’s dread spills into the shared space, while Marco becomes caretaker and mediator, trying to contain both his friend’s distress and the alarm it causes. Duccio eventually falls silent, but the arrival of a group of Boy Scouts renews the crisis. He objects to their boarding, and Marco recognizes that the Ljubljana weekend is no longer possible.

Leaving the flight

To get Duccio off the aircraft, Marco passes himself off as a doctor and invents a diagnosis of a type B epileptic seizure. He is only in his second year of medical school, but the claim serves its immediate purpose: the crew agrees to reopen the hatch and remove them. Their luggage is brought up from the hold on the runway at Pisa, and the two friends return to the terminal as the aircraft begins taxiing.

The exit brings an abrupt change in Duccio. Once on the ground, he becomes calm and even euphoric, as though he has returned from an underworld to ordinary life. Marco, by contrast, is furious. He suppresses his anger to avoid another public scene, and his silence darkens the journey that follows. At the time, leaving the plane appears to have cost them their trip and exposed Marco to the humiliation of having to improvise a medical explanation.

The crash and the reversal

The narrative later discloses that the charter flight, a DC-9-30 operated by Koper Aviopromet, has gone down in the sea off the northern coast of Cyprus, near Larnaca. Marco does not know this while the tragedy is taking place. The people he had watched boarding are dead, and Duccio’s fearful pronouncements—dismissed during the airport episode as part of his panic—acquire a terrible retrospective force.

The sequence reverses the apparent meaning of Marco’s decision. His invented diagnosis and the crew’s decision to remove the pair seemed to end in frustration; instead, they separate the friends from a doomed flight. Duccio’s fear has not been shown to be a reliable explanation of what will happen, but its language anticipates the catastrophe closely enough to unsettle the distinction between panic and omen. Marco alone retains any knowledge of the connection between Duccio’s warnings and the passengers’ fate, while remaining unaware of the disaster when it first occurs.

Significance

The episode binds friendship, chance, and foreknowledge into a single reversal. Marco acts practically, using an improvised false diagnosis to protect Duccio and remove him from a situation that has become unmanageable. The action is not presented as a deliberate rescue from a known danger: neither friend knows the plane is doomed. Its significance emerges only afterward, when the apparent cost of Duccio’s fear and Marco’s intervention becomes survival.

The account also gives Duccio’s characteristic dread a double meaning. On the aircraft, his fear isolates him from the other passengers and draws their attention; after the crash, his insistence that they are already dead is no longer merely a disruption in the story’s memory of the flight. The tragedy does not erase the comic and humiliating details of the airport episode, but it changes their weight. What seemed like a failed weekend becomes the last-minute separation of two friends from a catastrophe.