Three Hours Between Planes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author: Francis Scott Fitzgerald 

Published: Esquire (Jul 1, 1941)

Genre: Short Stories

“Three Hours Between Planes” is a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published posthumously in Esquire in 1941. 

1. Synopsis

In “Three Hours Between Planes,” the protagonist Donald Plant has three hours before his next connecting flight. He takes the opportunity to visit Mrs. Gifford, his childhood love, who happens to be in the city where he has stopped. 

2. Story Summary

We are introduced to Donald Plant, a widower waiting for his connecting flight at an airport. While waiting, he realizes that the city he is in is where his childhood love, Mrs. Gifford, lives. He decides to pay a visit, hoping to pursue a relationship with her. 

He reaches her home. They talk for a while, and the mood starts to become intimate. Mrs. Gifford takes out a photo album, where she claims to have a photo of him inside. Daniel realizes she has mistaken him for another boy named Daniel Bowers and points it out. Mrs. Gifford is devastated and asks Daniel to leave. Daniel leaves sullenly, disappointed and depressed. 

3. Quotes from Three Hours Between Planes

“Donald sat for five minutes with two thoughts – first the hopeless impossibility of reconciling what different people remembered about the same event – and secondly that in a frightening way Nancy moved him as a woman as she had moved him as a child. Half an hour had developed an emotion that he had not known since the death of his wife – that he had never hoped to know again.”

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