A 15-year-old girl who thought she was simply catching a flight home ended up making a huge difference to a stranger’s journey after an unexpected call for assistance.

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Clara Daly, from Calabasas, California, was travelling with her mother, Jane, when she volunteered to help a deafblind passenger who was struggling to communicate with cabin crew.

What started as a simple request for assistance turned into a heartwarming encounter, with the teenager spending the final hour of the flight keeping the man company.

The incident happened on June 18, 2018, aboard an Alaska Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles, with a scheduled stop in Portland, Oregon.

Clara and her mother hadn’t originally planned to be on that particular aircraft.

Their initial flight home had been cancelled, forcing them to rush to the airport to catch an alternative service.

It was a frustrating change of plans that Clara would later come to see very differently.

Around an hour into the journey, flight attendants made an announcement asking whether anyone on board knew American Sign Language.

The crew had been trying to communicate with a passenger named Tim Cook, who was both deaf and blind.

Tim had been visiting his sister in Boston and was travelling home to Portland alone.

Although flight attendants wanted to make sure he was comfortable, they were having difficulty understanding what he needed.

Clara, who had been studying American Sign Language for around a year at school, heard the announcement and pressed her call button. She soon discovered that communicating with Tim required a particular technique.

Rather than using conventional visual signing, she needed to spell letters directly into his hand so he could understand through touch.

Despite having limited experience, Clara was willing to give it a go.

Speaking to ABC station KABC-TV, she recalled their first interaction.

“I like knelt down into the aisle and I just put my hands inside his hands and I started asking like ‘How are you?’ ‘Are you OK?’ ‘Do you need anything?'” she said. “He told me that he needed some water so then [flight attendants] got him some water.”

With Clara’s help, the cabin crew were able to understand Tim’s request and bring him a drink.

But that wasn’t the end of their interaction.

Throughout the journey, Tim asked for Clara’s assistance on several occasions, including when he wanted to know how much longer the flight would take.

Each time, the teenager returned to his seat to help.

Eventually, however, Tim called for her again for an entirely different reason.

He didn’t need another drink or information about the journey; He simply wanted somebody to talk to.

“He didn’t need anything. He was just like lonely and wanted to talk,” Clara told CBS Los Angeles.

Rather than returning to her own seat, Clara stayed with him, using tactile signing to have a conversation.

The pair chatted about their backgrounds, with Clara later explaining that they spent the final hour of the flight talking.

“For the last hour of the flight, we just talked,” she said. “It’s good to make someone feel like they’re not as alone as they might have thought that they were. … It’s important for more people to learn the language.”

Another passenger, Lynette Scribner, witnessed the interaction and subsequently shared the story on Facebook.

Scribner had previously seen Tim communicating with his sister before boarding and understood how important Clara’s assistance had become. She described watching the teenager patiently spell letters into Tim’s hand as they carried on their conversation.

“It was fascinating to watch as she signed one letter at a time into his hand. He was able to ‘read’ her signing and they carried on an animated conversation,” Scribner said. “I can’t say enough about this beautiful young woman named Clara who didn’t think twice about helping her fellow passenger.”

Clara’s parents, Jane and Bill Daly, were understandably proud. Jane photographed her daughter helping Tim and later shared the pictures on Facebook, where the story attracted widespread attention.

“She’ll probably kill me for posting this, but – Proud of my girl,” she wrote.

The teenager’s actions soon went viral, although Clara struggled to understand why people were making such a fuss.

“Doing something like that is just like what anyone would have done,” she said.

Looking back, Clara also reflected on the extraordinary coincidence that had brought them together.

Had their original direct flight to Los Angeles not been cancelled, she and her mother would never have boarded the aircraft carrying Tim to Portland.

Instead, an inconvenient change to their travel arrangements had placed Clara in exactly the right position to help.

“I think everything happens for a reason,” Clara told KABC-TV. “I got put on a flight where I had purpose … and was given a use.”

Over on social media, people were quick to flood the young woman with praise. “What a beautiful soul she has been blessed with having and sharing,” one person wrote.

A second added: “She smiles up at him just gloriously, even though he can’t see her. I hope somehow he was feeling those beautiful smiles.”

Featured image credit: Alaska Airlines / Facebook / Lynette Scribner