Come Fly With Me: The Funny Side of Air Disasters
I really, really like aeroplanes. As a kid, I spent day after day building models of them, and identifying them and reading about them, but I’ve always thought that the most interesting thing about planes is that they sometimes stop flying at the worst possible moment; ie, quite suddenly, when they’re up in the air. The failures of aircraft to make it home is addressed with engrossing detail in my favourite telly program of all time, Air Crash Investigation.
ACI has got everything; horror, drama, thrills and spills, derring-do, technological mindfucks, forensic investigation, mystery, existential near-death (or genuine death) experiences, blind terror and, in one memorable case, a ghost popping into the galley to warn some stewardesses that their plane is an accident waiting, impatiently, to happen. (They made a telemovie about that incident, with Ernest Borgnine as the earnest apparition of the dead pilot. ‘Beware of fire in this aircraft!’ Hey, don’t have a cow, man.)
Not a lot of romance or sex in ACI, I grant you, although there’s plenty of humour, which, of course, couldn’t be less intentional. But when a distracted pilot lets his fourteen-year-old son drive an Airbus A320 into the Siberian tundra, well … can’t you see the funny side?
You’d imagine that when aeroplanes hit the ground off-airport, or off-off-airport, into the sea or a forest, or over eighty kilometres of mountainside, in most cases the cause would be unfussily self-evident: vicious unbearable turbulence, running out of gas, double duck strike (we’ll get to the miracle on the Hudson shortly), poor aim or pure lack of ability on approach, bad luck (as in hitting another plane – the universe is a big place, after all), elderly death traps coughing out some ancient rivets from vital superstructures.
These are reasons most of us are familiar with. But for every crash there is left in its wake a fascinating trail of mistakes, acts of kindergarten stupidity, and previously unannounced faults in mint condition aircraft. Why did the autopilot do that? Why did the pilot do the other thing? Why did the service guy forget to screw in some nuts? Why did the guy who worked with the pilot and first officer try to kill both of them with a huge hammer? (True.)
In 1974, at Tenerife airport in Spain, a 747 belonging to the Dutch airline KLM steamed down the runway straight into a Pan Am 747 taxiing the other way. Five hundred and eighty-three people died. It wasn’t a good result. Obviously, it was due in part to pilot error, but how that error occurred, the plethora of events that led to the crash, and its achingly simple preventability is the sort of thing that ACI is tremendous at exploring and revealing, not to mention magnificently re-enacting in shit-scary detail.
We learn about micro-bursts, windshear, and how, as a pilot, you can get sucked out of the front of the plane (when a window blows out), and still be all right if you are held on to by two guys clutching your belt. This is because your body freezes in the very, very cold air, and when whoever is now landing the plane brings it to a halt and they drag you back inside, you can be re-animated. Now, there’s a story for the grandkids.
Am I morbid? Am I watching disaster porn? I figure this stuff interests everybody. Doesn’t it interest you? My housemate has to put on headphones when I watch ACI. She doesn’t want to know. Nervous flyer. Me, I can’t get enough of it and yet – paradoxically, to say the least – I am terrified of being in a plane crash.
I’m better these days. I fly four or five times a year. On a clear day, I can enjoy it very much. I look forward to being pressed back in my seat as the engines get angry, and I love that first slight gut-challenge of uplift. I could stare down over that beautiful vast worldscape all day. It’s the only chance, isn’t it, for us to pretend that things are really nice down here, because everything looks so nice from up there?
But I used to fair near shit myself getting on a plane. Valium was only prescribed (and with admirable impunity) for stressed-out MILFs, not for thirteen-year-olds, in the seventies. And nobody would buy me a bottle of Smirnoff, so air travel for me back in the day was about the worst thing in the world. And yet, I would have watched ACI if it had been on then, anyway. I couldn’t have become any more alarmed than I already was, even when looking at a plane disaster highlights reel.
Unlike your regular whitey TV drama or blanched soap, ACI is, as well, a program where the careers of actors of many ethnic persuasions receive a bump. It depicts plane crashes accurately and without prejudice (the body count, staggering or small, is not really a factor), so actors of various colours and creeds get to play pilots and co-pilots, which is a bit of a double-edged sword, because they’re portraying fellow countrymen who either can’t fly, or who work for an airline, their country’s airline, which can’t fly either. There’s screen work, too, for actors who can play investigators, cabin crew and passengers. It’d keep a casting agency on its toes; ‘Can you get me seventy-five Indonesians, an Arab and a Turk, or similar, by Thursday?’
We’ve all watched enough Star Trek to know that when the crew are chucked from left to right and right to left as they scrap with aliens in their fuck-off, space-hoon muscle-ships, the camera provides the opposite angles, to mimic the full effect of a big hit. On set, of course, this would look completely ridiculous but that slapstick stuff is small fry compared with the sort of synchronised chaos and violence required to simulate the effects of a plane doing tight spirals or backflips as it falls from the sky. And having to sit in a fake fuselage as fans the size of trucks blow air at you to demonstrate what it’s like to be in a plane with a no roof is a tough gig. The reconstructions and re-enactments are scarifying. Forget Avatar and check some of this shit out. A white-hot 747 engine cowling coming at you in 3D is not something you can easily forget.
Most of us have never enjoyed the adventure of cruising along in a plane suddenly transformed into an open-top bus. But we’ve all had our little moments up in the sky. I experienced an emergency take-off abort one day, the plane coming to a screeching halt just as we were about to take flight. That was kinda cool. The last time I went home to Tassie, my plane did a mysterious lap of the airport just as we were on a final approach. ‘We missed,’ said the girl sitting next to me. And we had. There’s not a lot of traffic at Launceston airport at 10 pm on a Sunday but, the thing is, flights to Tassie are usually fobbed off on slightly wet-behind-the-ears pilots who still have a bit of ‘If at first you don’t succeed …’ about them.
For most people, the aircraft they’re on is ‘the plane’, much as you would speak of ‘the tram’. For me, the machine is never anonymous, not merely big or small. It’s either a Boeing 737 (the drone, the dull default people mover) or an exciting 767, or an even more exciting big-arse Airbus A300.
But best of all is the new Airbus A380, which is the two-storey one, and which is clearly too big to get off the ground. Surely that will become evident at some point; that sort of luck never lasts. So, I should try to get a ride in one before there are problems – Airbuses (or Airbi?) collapsing in on themselves, or flopping indelicately in fields the way Howard Hughes’s under-powered air tanks used to.
At the cute regional level, Rex flies the Saab 340, a little aeroplane with propellers, and a vehicle, you imagine, that doesn’t do much for a pilot’s self-esteem. Cops on horses being passed by fellow officers in V8 pursuit cars probably feel the same.
What you primarily feel at the end of an episode of ACI, beyond fascination and the boffins’ mind-boggling determination to know exactly what happened, is real sympathy for the passengers, who are the only participants in these sagas who are never culpable. Except for the ones with bombs, that is.
Every accident leads to ‘recommendations’, which are implemented in order to prevent another prang. And the alterations are generally minor, addressing insidious little Achilles-heel problems that shouldn’t have needed such catastrophes to happen in order to make them apparent.
The black box flight data recorder was invented by an Australian guy in the nineteen fifties and began to be installed in commercial aircraft in the mid sixties. It’s been an invaluable asset to crash investigators, but both the cockpit voice recorder and instrument info boxes are heavy, can still be damaged, and are a bitch to find when they end up at the bottom of the sea. Why haven’t black boxes been miniaturised into small digital failsafe computer transponders relaying information every minute to the ground, to be checked over later if necessary? I don’t know.
And you know what else planes don’t have? (And I have researched this.) They don’t have rear-view mirrors. So, if an engine flames out or is being torn apart en route by a sky devil, like in that episode of The Twilight Zone, the flight crew can react in two ways. One is to look at the panel in front of them that has lit up and is suggesting with urgent blinks that an engine has failed, in which case, in the pilot’s mind, it’s the light rather than the engine that’s faulty, so might as well ignore it and get back to the crossword. Or, just to be safe, send one of the crew down the aisle to look out the window, searching for visual confirmation. Well, hey waddya know? The light is not faulty. The engine is engulfed in flames. Wouldn’t a rear-view mirror be useful? Yes, of course it fucking would. Do I need to write a letter to my local member?
At the foot of the unsettling ACI web page, there is, I swear, an ad for, and a link to, a website where you can go about conquering your fear of flying. Because if you weren’t afraid when you started reading about the accidents, now that you’ve gotten to the bottom of the page, you surely are. (And advising you to eat the in-flight food to distract you from thinking about fireballs screaming down the aisle seems a bit lame.)
What is of some comfort are facts such as this: most planes get hit by lightning and they’re designed to neutralise it. So, if you are flying through a storm and can see nothing out the window except the flash, every six seconds or so, of blinding storm activity, a preview of a day in hell … everything’s fine. I include this information for the benefit of a friend who recently found herself praying to god on a routine trip from Sydney to Melbourne. The late conversion to religion is a common occurrence on bumpy rides. So, get to know your deity.
Of course, you are far safer, we’re reminded constantly, in a plane than in a car – yeah, so what’s that supposed to mean? Anything is safer than being in a car. You’re more likely to win millions of bucks in a lottery than be in a plane accident. Yeah, well, I’m not sure the maths on that works out.
I want my pilots strong-jawed, confident, dedicated, clean living and brave. Svelte, tall and clean-shaven. Steely, calm and reassuring. Men, or, if absolutely necessary, women (I know, I know, I’m sorry, flying a plane just seems like it’s a boy thing, like starting wars), who have no outré sexual proclivities or undiagnosed illnesses. Guys who don’t wear women’s knickers. Women who don’t wear strap-ons. I want cartoon heroism. I want that guy who landed the 767 in the river.
As if New Yorkers hadn’t already had enough terrible plane action happening outside their office windows, imagine the sight of a heavy-duty airliner coming down quite gracefully and, you could be forgiven for thinking, deliberately, out on the river. An early end to the PowerPoint sales presentation, you'd imagine.
Pilot ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, the Sullster – or, as I like to call him, Ned Flanders – pulled off an absolutely freakish trick when he glided a big aeroplane deftly onto the Hudson. All well and good, but I’m of the opinion that there has to be a fall from grace. Perhaps the Sullman, the Sullmeister, and his criminally unheralded first officer falling asleep and waking up over some country they can’t recognise, for example. Or something to do with flight plans being discussed in toilet cubicles. I can see over his shoulder his infuriated wife, just holding it together as he delivers the mea culpa to the press. I see homophobic survivors of his gallant landing burning their Sullbooks. The potential sullying of Sully has already started for me. I mean, read this, for god’s sake.
New York, Nov.23 (ANI): A pilot who landed a jetliner in New York’s Hudson River, has said his heroics have led to ‘rock star sex’. In an interview with NBC’s People of the Year TV, Chesley Sullenberger and his wife, Laurie, said the famous incident had done wonders for their marriage. ‘He doesn’t know I’m gonna say this, but I had joked the other day that … the hero sex really helps a 20-year-old marriage,’ Mrs Sullenberger said. To which Sullenberger added: ‘Rock star sex.’
To which I add: Shut the fuck up.
‘Hey, baby …who’s your hero pilot? Oh yeah, I’m your hero pilot. Oh yeah, right there on the reverse thruster.’
Australia’s safety record is disturbingly impeccable. Qantas has never lost a passenger; not in the smear-of-bloody-pulp-on-a-rock-face way, at least, even though they seem to have been trying to for a while. It’s lost passengers who have deserted them for better service elsewhere, but there has never been a jet passenger crash in Australia … ever.
This should further ease all our anxieties about flying, but surely that big fat zero can’t last forever? And, I can assure you, when that day comes, when Channel Seven gets the monster breaking-news story it’s waited patiently for, when every blonde reporter from the Channel Nine news heads out to the crash site, when The 7pm Project has to work out how Hughesy will deal with the disaster, I will be part of it, a passenger dying for the cause of future safety improvements, part of all new episodes of Air Crash Investigation.
If you can find any bits of me, scatter my ashes over the Melbourne airport car park walkway. It seems only right.
Michael Witheford is a Melbourne-based writer and hack bass player, whose new band, The TV Set, debuts at the Marquis of Lorne in Fitzroy on Sunday 8th August from 6pm-8pm. He blogs sporadically at ‘Thought Crimes’.
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