Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Jamaican Slide

The holiday season of 2009 delivered its first of several strange plane events in the shape of a runway slide in Jamaica.


The reporting around the runway mishap in Jamaica included the following ironies:

1. The American Airlines flight from Miami had experienced heavy turbulence, and when the plane finally touched down, the passengers clapped; at that point the aircraft began to skid, and the passengers began to scream. This was an unpleasant reminder that the air is not always the most dangerous part of flight—sometimes the ground is just as slippery.

2. When the plane reached the end of the runway, skidding, it "smashed through a perimeter fence" and then came to rest in a "sandy embankment." Perimeter fences around airports are designed to keep nefarious people out. But perhaps we need more airports designed with safety nets to keep planes in, as well. (There was a design in the 1920s for an airfield that was to be situated on top of skyscrapers, replete with safety nets hanging below to catch planes that overshot the elevated landing strips—given the recent runway slides, maybe this is not such a bad idea.)

3. When the plane came to a halt, the "lights went out, and suitcases and bags popped out of the overhead bins and fell onto passengers." This scene is right out of any number of movies that show flimsy overhead bins flapping open and bags bouncing out, comically. But seriously, overhead bins are supposed to keep carry-on baggage contained—most importantly during emergencies. So it is ironic that amidst the pandemonium of a runway slide, the oft-troped overhead bins would fail, too, adding a little bit of slapstick comedy to a terrifying situation.

4. The Jamaican slide was no less dramatic for how the Boeing 737 reportedly came to a stop "10-15 feet from the sea and boulders"—I want to know more details about this scene. How did it feel to deplane out of the emergency exits and hear the surf booming so close by? And was this encounter with the nighttime sea, for anyone on the plane, a pleasant if sudden reminder that they had indeed arrived at their vacation destination?

5. One passenger, Natalie Morales-Hendricks, was quoted as describing the incident as such: “We just buckled and bumped... It was like being in a car accident." The irony here exists at the convergence of cars and planes—these are two utterly distinct contemporary mobilities that keep finding odd resonances. Thus BMW advertises their new backseat configuration as "First Class," and the Northwest pilots who overshot the Minneapolis airport in October were compared to car drivers texting. This suggests something about the inability to recognize uniqueness—and plane crashes much be maintained as unique in order to justify the intensity of airport security and the sanctity of the airliner as a symbol of freedom. Yet even here, on the Jamaican tarmac, the harrowing experience gets gobbled up by the familiar and mundane: "like being in a car accident."

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Overnight on the Tarmac

Today's strange plane event is in The New York Times: "A Night Spent on the Tarmac, With No Complaints."

It makes an especially nice pairing with a top story of the moment:

Sunday, November 29, 2009

American One

Since our son was born my wife and I have seen exactly three movies. We simply can’t make it through an hour-and-a-half or two-hour movie without nodding off. And because we’re almost always too tired to read before bed (what we did previous to our son’s arrival), we have found watching an episode of a TV series an indispensable nightly ritual. Our son is now two-and-a-half years old, which means we’ve run through innumerable series—from Six Feet Under to The Forsyte Saga to Magnum P.I. (okay, sometimes my taste isn’t very discerning).

Our latest fascination is with Mad Men. I’m not that interested in ad men or in the scenes of early 1960s New York City. But the dialogue is so sharp and smart that I wasn’t surprised when the first episode of the second season featured the main character reading, and later reciting, from the poet Frank O’Hara’s collection Meditations in an Emergency. Frank O’Hara is not only the right poet for the job (he wrote quintessential “city” poems), but he is also the first poet I was obsessed with. In fact, it’s not O’Hara’s city poems that interest me as much as his love poems, which, by turns, play sentimentalism off banality and surrealism off realism. I would even go so far as to argue that O’Hara is the greatest love poet of the twentieth century—though most poetry readers know him almost exclusively for his “I do this, I do that” poems, often thought of as simple, random lists written while walking the streets of Manhattan.

Mad Men is anything but simple. In the second episode of the second season, the precipitating event is a plane crash. And not any plane crash. American Airlines Flight 1 took off from Idlewild Airport (today’s JFK) on March 1, 1962, in clear skies. Two minutes later the plane nose-dived into Jamaica Bay. Despite many being famous millionaires, none of the 95 passengers and crew survived. In the Mad Men episode, two of the ad bosses walk into the agency that morning to find all their employees in a massive football-style huddle. It is an eerie moment for the viewer, not only because everyone is huddled up (around what turns out to be a radio), but because everyone is taking the news as if a loved one had been on the plane. Or maybe, it is more important that they are huddled up around one media device, not football-style but campfire-style. On the entire floor of a Manhattan ad agency, that little boxy radio was their only link to outside news; it is a quaint sight considering even the most mundane or remote office floor today.

As a plane crash, American Airlines Flight 1 isn’t very interesting. As an example of the reporting around a plane crash, it’s fascinating. “Tragedy in Jamaica Bay” reads the headline of the March 9, 1962 issue of Time magazine. “It was ideal flying weather” is the first line. The same day “American One” (as the doomed plane is called) crashes, John Glenn is given a ticker tape parade in New York City for being the first American to orbit the earth.

Here is a passage from the article:

A minute after the crash, it lay like a giant, shattered fish just beneath the transparent waters of the bay, with scattered debris and flakes of aluminum skin glinting on the tufts of marshland. The only signs of life were clouds of wheeling sea gulls, roused from a nearby bird sanctuary, and a dozen helicopters that whirled to the scene like a swarm of dragonflies.

If I were teaching this piece, I would draw my students’ attention to the sheer amount of figurative language in the description. The plane is described as a giant, shattered fish—a fish, but first turned enormous, and then solidified into something that could be shattered. Scale and material are warped along with the main subject in question; in crashing, the plane has left the figurative ground. The fishiness continues with the “flakes of aluminum skin glinting on the tufts of marshland”—we are in a phantasmagorical nether region, between land and sea, fallen from the air. The imagery becomes even stranger: disturbed sea gulls become “wheeling” clouds (to mix metaphors atmospheric and machinic), and helicopters become “a swarm of dragonflies”—the plane crash has landed us humans in a world where categories of the human and non-human collapse, and everything is subject to dramatic revision.

What is so interesting and somewhat naive sounding about this Time article is the tone of near disbelief: To acknowledge the reality that a new, cutting edge aircraft could—gasp—crash! The innocence both soothes and piques my interest, until the article arrives at a familiar trope that I thought only got bastardized in the late 1990s: irony.

Ironically, 17 passengers had transferred to American One at the last moment, when a United Air Lines flight was canceled.

What exactly is “ironic” about a flight being canceled and passengers being rerouted? This happens everyday. Nearly avoided crashes do not always constitute irony any more than crashes consummated. When we sense an intriguing or inexplicable coincidence we often call it “ironic,” when we really just want to say “what an intriguing and inexplicable coincidence.”

It is this same impetus, I believe, that is behind what my college religion professor termed “God of the gaps.” Whenever a certain phenomenon or event can’t be explained or accounted for, people often attribute it to God until at some point it is demystified. The article ends by stating that the crash “may keep its secrets hidden forever in the muck of Jamaica Bay.” Perhaps at some point in the future someone will stumble upon one of those secrets—of its 25,000 acres of marshland, the bay is losing about 40 acres per year.

In the end, the Time article about the crash seems more distant than the crash itself. The article foregrounds the fact that there were multiple millionaires on the flight—is that, finally, what made it a “tragedy”? And yet, there I am at the end of the Mad Men episode—my wife in the bathroom brushing her teeth and our toddler fast asleep in our bed—turning on the computer. I’ve done my research on American Airlines Flight 1, and now it’s time to check eBay again—I’ve been watching dozens of auctions for weeks now, trying to find a good deal on a Fisher-Price airplane from the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Three weeks later I will get a box in the mail with a plastic airplane made in 1980 (it won’t be as nice as the earlier models but it’ll be far less expensive). And I will have to teach our son not to kick the plane against the wall, but to zoom it on the floor and then up in the air around the room. No matter how many lessons, though, he will prefer to use the plane in the bathtub, and he will teach me that better than the vintage Fisher-Price houseboat, which I spent too much money on a month ago, the plane will indeed float.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

A Little Airplane Reader

Look at this little airplane reader:


He's in his own little world, buckled in and flying along, reading about dinosaurs. He looks like a miniature man, settled in to a little workaday routine...not so much on vacation as concentrating on distraction, just getting through another flight, on his way to somewhere to close a mini-deal, perhaps purchasing a large quantity of small brontosauruses that will be shipped back in the belly of the plane on the boy's return flight. He's ready for adulthood, or already there: just look at that face, that angle of relaxation and the way that his lap-belt is secured but not too tight, the tail end flipped ever so carelessly across his jean-clad thigh. Out the window and far below lies the world, where dinosaurs once roamed, and where other children suckle and crawl, waiting to fly.

Monday, November 9, 2009

The Angel of Flight

I am not at all afraid to fly. But last night, I was afraid in flight.

The plane was descending into the New Orleans area, and the dips, drops, and buckling caused by wind gusts were enough to make my hands sweat. I couldn't help but watch the all too flimsy looking wing whipping up and down out my window. Every time the little light blinked at the tip of the wing, I got a momentary glimpse of rain pellets being driven sideways. The ground looked so, so far away: cozy homes dotted by soft yellow lights, petite streets with silent cars and trucks, the reflective bayous—all rendered targets from this perverse missile-perspective of the plane-about-to-lose-its wings. My hands sweated more.

It is in times like these that I pray to the angel of flight. I first learned of the angel of flight at the Sacramento airport, when I saw a statue of it next to a random wheelchair—as if it had healed someone and, biblically, the person had risen and walked away:


I think about the angel of flight, I think about that empty wheelchair, and I know that everything will be okay, because the angel of flight watches over everyone, or most people, most of the time, excluding fatal crashes, in which case the angel of flight is not to be considered. But in this moment, crashing through clouds into the stormy orange glow of New Orleans, I found myself worshiping, reverently, the angel of flight.

The truth is that I don't know the name or meaning of that statue at the Sacramento airport, and I did not pray last night as the Airbus buckled. I sat there thinking about my life, about what I would miss if I were to die, and about what it would feel like to crash. I wondered if I should move away from my window seat, if I should put my USB drive into my pocket in case I had to do a duck-and-roll move to escape the skidding, burning wreckage of the fuselage, in order to protect the work that I'd done over the past few days. I basically thought these thoughts until the plane touched down; and then I thought about all the other things in life that get put on pause in flight.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Plane Crash Test Dummies

Take a long look at these plane crash test dummies:



On the one hand, they look comfortable—as if they are relaxed or meditating. On the other hand, they look tight-necked, blissed-out, preparing for impact, ready to meet their maker.... Now that I examine them more closely, why aren’t they hunched over in crash position? And how come no one is holding that baby!

This photo is from a test plane (Boeing 720 set for retirement after 20,000 flight hours) that was crashed in the Mohave Desert on December 1, 1984. Through the FAA, the Secretary of Transportation sponsored the test which was to determine, among other things, energy-absorbing seat designs and improved cabin fire safety. The plane was flown by remote control, and an anti-misting kerosene (jet fuel) was used to prevent any post-crash fire. But the crash landing didn’t go as planned. The engine on the left wing hit the ground first, the plane yawed, and a fireball erupted inside the cabin. Despite the fact that firefighters took about two hours to put the fire out, the FAA estimated that about 19 of the 53 passengers might have survived.

There is no information as to whether or not the baby lived or died.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Into the Great Wide Open

I am on a trip to Washington D.C. for the American Studies Association annual meeting.

At the New Orleans airport, drinking a Naked juice and waiting for my flight to board. It will be the first time I’ve flown on an Embraer 170 regional jet, and I wonder: what will happen? What new sensations will I have, unfamiliar to my Airbus and Boeing mind? Settling into my seat, I hear a new noise: the armrest that divides the two seats slams down—no thin rubber shock absorber—making a jolting POP as metal hits metal. That seems low-tech. Then: I’m in a ‘window seat’ without a window. 9A and 9F, apparently, are absent windows even though they are, technically, ‘window seats’. Are these bad omens?

The plane taxis, and I hear familiar lurching and whirring sounds. At the end of the runway, the engines rev to maximum thrust, we go down the runway, and we are in the air. Everything is fine, a takeoff like normal—if taking off at well over 100 miles per hour and rocketing into the sky can be called ‘normal’.

A little turbulence, but otherwise an uneventful flight, made doubly uneventful because of my windowless window seat. So, instead of looking out at the lights of towns below (because I can't), I work on an article I’m trying to finish.

The plane lands with the traditional BUMP-bump. We taxi to the gate. I see Washington Dulles out the window, getting closer: it is long and sleek, a little concrete wave blinking with lights, thank you Eero Saarinen. But we taxi past it—way way past it. We arrive at our gate, at which point I think I must have gotten disoriented and that we must have circled around. But no: we are in a separate concourse. I only learn this, though, after tromping down a very gradual decline, a carpeted hillside, following the signs that say BAGGAGE CLAIM to the point where I have to board a gigantic, wide bus. This bus, which is called a "transit lounge" by an announcement overhead, looks like it’s out of Star Wars. We wait until it is jam-packed with passengers and their constantly tipping-over roller-bags, at which point it pulls away from the concourse and roves toward the terminal building, sounding eerily like it has jet engines.

Then, a long taxi ride to my hotel. My taxi driver visits Michigan every summer, so we have that to talk about. I ask him if he has ever visited the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes; he tells me about he prefers to drink vodka in a motel pool near St. Ignace.

Dropped off at the hotel, you find yourself turned from an I to a you. You find yourself too tired to find exciting food down the block, and so you end up in the hotel restaurant, eating a “Cheddar Steak Burger” and drinking enormous glasses of an Argentinean cabernet sauvignon. You find yourself tapping your feet absurdly along to Tom Petty. You find that you know the words, culled from 15 years ago or more. You find yourself missing your mate, and your cats. You find yourself thinking, what a strange plane event.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Strange Plane Events


From crashes to lost baggage, from views of the tarmac to toy planes, from terrorist threats to toilets at 37,000 feet, this blog accounts for the strange plane events of our lives.

This blog has two authors: one is so afraid of flying that he breaks into a cold-sweat the minute he steps into an airport. The other used to work for an airline—so, when he sees a Canadair Regional Jet, he sees 50 or 70 seat-back pockets to clean out, and a pile of SkyMall catalogs to replenish. In other words, this blog will run the gamut, from the dramatic extremes to the mundane details of our great age of flight.