Whoopi Goldberg Recalls Harrowing Volcano Encounter on ‘The View’

Whoopi Goldberg returned to The View on Tuesday (July 7), and boy, did she have a story to tell.

The cohost and moderator was unexpectedly absent on Monday’s (July 6) show because of airport closures associated with the eruption of Mt. Etna, after she spent her week-long Fourth of July vacation in Sicily. What we didn’t know, though, was that she was already onboard her flight when the blast happened.

“I’m very ashy, very ashy,” Goldberg joked to start the show, before explaining her plight. “The volcano finally let me leave because she decided she was not putting up, and she just, she snapped. Now, we are on the plane [at the time]. We have no idea this is happening, and the pilot, we hear the engine turnover, and he [says], ‘If you look out the right [side], you’ll see that Mt. Etna just erupted.’ He just said, ‘Mt. Etna just blew her top.’ Yeah, I’m thinking to me, ‘If you had just put your foot on the accelerator, we’d be home by now!'”

Goldberg then went on to explain that because of the eruption, that was not possible. “In actuality, they would not have been able to go. You cannot fly through that stuff… When they put the fuel in, you’re extra heavy, so you can only take off on certain runways. And so there’s a whole [issue] with all this flying stuff. I’ve learned a lot of stuff, but this thing, you could not have gone around it, you could not have gone up it, and it spread, so it’s not that whatever’s coming out here, it’s what’s happening up in the atmosphere. It’s sand, so it can really [mess up the plane].”

Joy Behar then chimed in to note her own experience with the sand around Mt. Etna, saying, “I was there one time. We drove up, yeah, Steve lost his eyesight. I said, ‘On my vacation!’ But anyway, we’re on the way up to the top of Mt. Etna, and he couldn’t see. I don’t know what that is, the atmosphere.”

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Behar then wondered aloud about the many people living on Mt. Etna, and Goldberg confirmed, “Well, they are away, I mean, Mt. Etna is one of the volcanoes that they actually know what’s going on with her. They’re in there, they know what’s happening, so they can sort of help people do what they need to do. Oh, but this sort of felt like she farted, basically, and it just kind of went this way and that way.”

Goldberg continued, “I feel terrible because none of the airports are open now. So people who were supposed to leave two days ago, still have not been [flown out] because all the airports are still closed.”

Behar then asked how did she manage to fly back, and Goldberg admitted, “We got out because I got a plane… And we had to wait because the window for us to be able to leave was 17 minutes… They said, ‘Between 11 and 11:17. If you are not, you can’t do it at 11:18. You can’t do it before [then]. This is the window you have.’ And we were like, ‘OK,’ because we grabbed a couple of other people and said, ‘We’re going to try to get a plane.’ They said, ‘Well, we’ll help’… because they need to get home to their kids. And so we did it.”

She went on to express her regrets for missing Good Morning America to promote her new show, The Whoopi Monologues. “So, hopefully, this week, Brian [Teta, executive producer], you’ll let me do a whole thing about it.”

The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC