Sunday, September 19, 2010

Cell Phone Lot



I first saw the sign about a year after the storm. I thought it indicated a place where you might go to buy, sell, or recycle old cellphones. I was in a rush on my way to a job interview at Loyola University, where I now teach, so I couldn’t pull over to investigate. But on the way back out of town, I turned into the lot and discovered that it affords a tremendous view of the airport. You can see the tower clearly, even on a foggy day, and the planes come in only a couple of hundred feet above your car before they land on the north-south runway.

The airport was first called Moisant Field after John Moisant, an aviation pioneer who died in a crash on the airfield at age 37. (The day before he died, Moisant raced his monoplane against a Packard and lost.) In 1962, the airport was renamed New Orleans International Airport, and in 2001, it was renamed again to Louis Armstrong International Airport. Second only to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport at 11 feet below sea level, Louis Amstrong is 4 feet above the water line.

Essentially across the street from the airport is the cell phone lot. Located at the corner of Airline Drive and Hollandey Street, the lot is a large trapazoidal patch of cement, roughly 200’ x 300’, circumscribed by a chain-link fence. No one seems to patrol the lot which, I believe, is because the airport doesn’t really need one. The cell phone lot was introduced into many airports a few years after 9/11 when you could no longer park curbside and had to endlessly circle arrivals and various airport roadways until your party popped out the doors of baggage claim. George Bush Intercontinental in Houston has a cell phone lot of more than 1000 car spaces, though the lot is called the “Passenger Pickup Waiting Lot.” La Guardia in New York has no such lot and instead hundreds of cars park on the shoulders of roadways or get in line for the mile-long crawl to baggage claim. Whether an airport has a cell phone lot or not seems to depend not on need but on available space. In New Orleans, the airport is only a 20 to 30 minute ride from downtown, and there’s really not that much car traffic in and out of arrivals. But obviously there was space, so in fall 2006 the sign went up.

What I do in the lot might be called ostensibly “aircraft spotting.” But the term doesn’t fit, for example, Wikipedia’s definition:

Aircraft spotting or plane spotting is the observation and logging of the registration numbers of aircraft: gliders, powered aircraft, balloons, airships, helicopters, and microlights. The purpose of this is unknown.

I observe, yes, but I don’t log information, per se, and that last sentence implies that what I do is ominous or incriminating; for the “unknown” is always a threat to someone.

I try to avoid the lot during late morning and early evening when it fills with taxis, most of whose drivers seem to be there to chat with one another. I would guess that some of the taxi drivers recognize me and wonder if I’m casing the airport in order one day to shoot down a plane with a shoulder-rocket.

One time a taxi driver pulled up parallel to my car. He rolled down his passenger’s side window and yelled “Good morning!”

I don’t know if he had seen me before in the lot and wondered why I am frequently there, or if he was simply bored. He was the cheery sort, and we talked—or rather yelled back and forth—a while about the weather, which is always a more serious conversation here than in other cities. He finally asked who I was waiting for.

“My wife.”

“Where’s she coming from?”

“New York.”

I thought it a bit odd that he was taking an interest in my wife’s travel itinerary. Then he began telling me about his wife and two kids back in Egypt—how he’d moved to New Orleans ten years ago, and now had a nice little house (“with backyard and two-car garage”) in Mississippi.

“You drive in from Gulfport with your taxi?”

“Steady airport fares all day long.”

He talked more about his family. His wife had been ill, on and off, back in Alexandria, but he couldn’t return home. It seemed he’d made his peace with having two homes—one here in the present, and one there in the past: He hadn’t been back to Egypt since he left.

“My son and daughter are now teenagers.” He said it without any desire for sympathy.

But I couldn’t help thinking to myself: What in hell do I ever have to complain about? And what am I doing out here at the fucking airport anyway?

I was about to start the car.

He reached up for something in his sun visor: a photo of his kids.

I reciprocated by taking out my cellphone which had a photo of my son holding his Fischer-Price airplane in the bathtub.

“Do you know the game ‘airplane’?” I said.

I explained that over and over I used to watch my wife play airplane with our baby son, pushing him up with her feet against his torso, and how I was always too worried about his getting hurt to do it myself.

He nodded, and handed the phone back to me.

“Of course,” I said, “our son loved playing airplane, especially when my wife intentionally crashed the plane—him—onto the bed. That’s the whole point of the game.”

He said something, but I continued: “One night, we were playing in his room, and he picked up that Fischer-Price airplane.” I motioned to it on the phone. “He cradled it, and then began rocking it in his arms singing Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop....in all honesty, at that moment, I don’t know whether I felt more tenderness for him or for the plane.”

I expected him to think I was a total lunatic, but he just smiled. He probably didn’t know the lullaby.

He said something about his wife, but I couldn’t understand him over the roar of an incoming plane. I began to feel a bit guilty about lying, so I told him I wasn’t actually waiting for my wife, but that I liked to watch the planes take off and land. And then that sounded a little juvenile, so I told him about my fear.

He said that he’d been on a plane only once, and didn’t really know if he had a fear of flying. Then, with his thumb, he pointed up to the sky.

But I didn’t see or hear a plane.

“There’s an African legend,” he said, thumb still midair, “that says long ago the sky used to be closer to us—so close you could reach up and touch it. But then, at mealtime people began using the sky as a napkin. The gods moved it higher and higher and finally out of reach.”

It didn’t make me feel any better. But it was a good story, one that I’ve repeated in the classroom whenever my students are having a hard time understanding why I believe myths and legends are still important, or why I am afraid to fly.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Steven Slater


This is the story of Steven Slater, the disrespected flight attendant who deployed his aircraft's emergency exit slide, grabbed a beer from the galley, and hollered "It's been great!" as he jumped out of the plane and left his job for good.

And this is David Sedaris in last week's New Yorker, ruminating on the culture of air travel: "But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport’s just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so?"

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The Art of Flight


Recently, I was doing research at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, and I came across the above typescript page. It's from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise, which won the National Book Award in 1985 and became the book that propelled DeLillo to fame as a post-modern writer. (For anyone who is interested, you can see this and his other papers at the Center. But as is custom in special collections, you may bring only an eraser-less pencil into the reading room and only staff will be allowed to make copies of manuscript pages.)

Although the page above is from a passage that never made it into the published book, it is vintage DeLillo. Here is the entire passage typed-out:
The plane bounced off the turf and came down again a quarter-mile away, grazing one car on busy State Highway 114 and demolishing a second car, whose driver was decapitated. The plane skipped across a grassy field, ricocheted off a water tower, then burst into flames as it slid across the tarmac. "It was like a wall of napalm," said Airline Mechanic Jerry Maximoff. The tail section, with one of the plane's three engines and the last ten rows of seats, was the only recognizable part of the wreckage.

Somehow 31 people, including three flight attendants, initially survived the impact and subsequent inferno. "It was all sunshine until we actually started coming down," said Jay Slusher, 33, a computer programmer who was going to catch another plane for his home in Phoenix. "Then the rain started, very heavy. It became so dark you couldn't even see out the windows. The ride got rougher and rougher. It seemed like there was something on top of the plane, pushing it to the ground. The pilot tried to pull out of it. The speed of the engines increased. We started rocking back and forth. Then we were tossed all around. I saw an orange streak coming toward me on the left side of the floor. I thought we were going to explode. At that point, I said, 'Well, it's all over.' The next thing that happened is that I ended up sitting in my seat on my side. I looked up and I could see the grass. I said, 'Thank you, Lord,' unbuckled my seat belt and jumped out."

Gilbert Green, 21, a football player at Florida State University, was sitting on the right side of the plane as the fire broke out. "It started to singe my arm," he recalled. "Right then the plane broke in half and I was shot out of the way of the fire. [The fuselage] broke off right in front of me. All the seats in front of me went the other way." Most of the survivors were in the smoking section. Said one: "That's the first time a cigarette ever saved my life." Even two dogs in the rear cargo section were saved.

Rescue workers toiled at first in a nearly horizontal driving rain. They placed yellow sheets over the dead, quickly assessed the severity of survivors' injuries and warned area hospitals by radio about what type of cases to expect. The Rev. Richard Brown, who was giving last rites to the victims, was startled when he saw the stomach of one, a baby, "going up and down." He baptized the infant instead and alerted medics, but the child later died. Most of the injured were taken by helicopter or ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where doctors had tried to save John F. Kennedy in 1963. Officials were heartened by the local response to appeals for blood donations. Some 1,500 people lined up to give.

As night fell, a large crane lifted pieces of wreckage in the search for bodies. Four were found under the landing gear. Floodlights illuminated the scene, which included the grotesque sight of corpses being loaded into refrigerator trucks labeled LIVE MAINE LOBSTERS. All three members of the cockpit crew were killed. The pilot, Captain Ted Connors, 57, had flown for Delta for 31 years. One passenger survived because she made a lucky decision. Assigned a front seat before takeoff from Fort Lauderdale, Annie Edwards, of Pompano Beach, Fla., shifted to a rear seat beside a friend, Juanita Williams. Both survived. They were among a group of women going to Dallas to attend a convention of Delta Sigma Theta, a sorority. Other passengers were heading for Los Angeles, the flight's last stop. Friends checking the arrivals list there found a curt message: "Flight 191. See agent."
Despite how gripping this writing is, DeLillo decided to kill it—in fact, the plane in his book never crashes, it merely loses all engine power for a few minutes and then makes a successful emergency landing. The passengers stand around the airport unable to quite leave, opting instead to recount their story of near death: “They were not yet ready to disperse, to reinhabit their earthbound bodies, but wanted to linger with their terror, keep it separate and intact for just a while longer.” The near fatal plane crash, thus, is a bond forged out of air, but embodied in people; it is an averted experience that yet throws bare life into stark relief.

What if the emergency landing hadn't gone very well, and some of these passengers actually suffered terrible deaths—wouldn't that have made a better story? Apparently, DeLillo thought otherwise. And this is where, it would seem, fiction cannot compete with real-life, because the above passage is not unpublished DeLillo; it's the Time magazine article about Delta Flight 191 that crashed on landing at Dallas-Forth Worth Airport on August 2, 1985.

Why did I type up part of the magazine article on my old Underwood, spill coffee on it, crumple it up, and deliberately mislead you, Dear Reader? To prove a point: this piece of journalism sounds as much like a post-modern novel as anything going today. But don't take my word for it—read the Time article yourself. Just beware: for some odd reason it's dated April 18, 2005, almost 20 years after the crash.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Silence

I was recently reading an article in Newsweek in the doctor’s office, which is probably the only place I read magazines like Newsweek anymore. The article was about silence, and its general tenor was a lament for the lack of silence in everyday life. I started to think about silence in my life and concluded that one of the few places I am bequeathed silence is in flight. No cell phone, no Internet, and very few distractions from others. (Though this may change as airlines are increasingly offering in-flight Wi-Fi and potentially cell phone coverage.)

But the silence on a plane isn’t quite silence of course. There is that constant roar-cum-hum of engines and air blasting. When I reflect on my twenty years of regular flight, I have to admit that I am more silent than I used to be. I remember engaging in long, if not interesting, conversations with fellow passengers. Sometimes by the end of a cross-country flight, I’d learn the entire life story of my seatmate—or they’d learn mine. But honestly I can’t recall the last time that happened—five years ago, ten? Now, I try not to talk to people. I prefer to sit there quietly, either to be bored or terrified, without interruption. If I am flying without my wife and child, I will put on my headphones even if my iPod is turned off. Perhaps this could all be racked up to my getting older and no longer interested, as I once was, in the possibilities of having sex at 35,000 feet with a stranger in the plane’s lavatory.

And when I consider the strangest silence inside a plane it is, in fact, in a lavatory. (Does anyone use the word “lavatory” anywhere but on a plane?) When I enter that tight space, I often perceive that I am and am not on a plane. Or at least I try not to think of being on a plane, because dying in a toilet during an air catastrophe is my equivalent to being buried alive.

Usually I only have to urinate in the lavatory, as I’ve left my nerve-turd in some john in the airport terminal before boarding. After I unzip, I hold onto something—the handy rail-like grip or the wall, in a kind of isometrics stance so that when I pee I won’t splash too much. The stream of urine pelts the inside of the mini-toilet bowl punctuating the eerie semi-silence, and for a moment I am comforted in the thought that God won’t let my plane go down with my penis flailing about. Because even if my prayers to God have always been met with silence, God, I reason, is supposed to be a decent guy.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Real Poetry

It may be apocryphal, but I’ve heard that pilots and surgeons have similar psychological profiles—they are aggressive, self-assured, contain a store of vast technical knowledge, intimidating. And whether or not it is factually true, the comparison does make sense. These are people we give great, blind trust to every day, unflinchingly. Our lives are literally in their hands, and very rarely do we even remember their names after the procedure or flight. It takes a certain amount of ego to name a piece “Real Poetry,” and Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich earn that cheekiness as they constantly dazzle us through this piece’s pure expanse and its technical dexterity. The reader is constantly confronted with all of these aforementioned traits—traits that can be extended to the essayist and poet. “Real Poetry” is a collaboration in aviation that doesn’t ask for your trust because it doesn’t need it. It knows exactly what it’s doing. Relax—you’re in good, capable hands.

—Nik de Dominic in his introduction to our piece “Real Poetry” at The Offending Adam

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Real Reporting

This is real reporting:

Clinton Has Plane Trouble, Hitches Ride Home

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- Even when you have your own plane, sometimes you get stuck in the airport.

That's what happened to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday, when mechanical trouble grounded her and her traveling party in Saudi Arabia.

Fortunately, if you are the top U.S. diplomat, you can hitch a pretty sweet ride. Gen. David Petraeus happened to be in the neighborhood, and he's stopping to pick her up. Petraeus was in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Clinton was a couple hours away in Jeddah.

Clinton told reporters that the government jet she uses has developed a fuel valve problem and could not be repaired quickly. She is leaving most of her traveling party behind.


Metaphors and metonyms:

"airport": Clinton was surely not sitting in an Eames Tandem seat, stuck listening to announcements as other flights boarded;

"sweet ride": airplane ≠ automobile;

"neighborhood": Saudi Arabia consolidated, minimized and thereby controlled by suburban logic;

"party": these political adventures are not all fun and games.

I'm not sure how this style of writing qualifies as 'news'. I think that the subject of air travel has created—gradually, almost imperceptibly—a new genre of reportage. It is a kind of writing that gets caught on lines of flight, like an eye that catches a spot in the sky and follows it, until it becomes a delta shaped airplane...or until it vanishes on the horizon. Such writing can be incredibly flighty, trying to track, as it were, moving targets. And when these targets themselves are targeting from above, it makes the task of writing all the more difficult.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The Concorde

As I have become increasingly afraid to fly, I have also become increasingly knowledgeable about flight. Until recently, for example, I thought that the Concorde was the first supersonic passenger plane. It was, however, the Soviets who beat the British and French on that score, just as they had beaten the Americans into space.

The prototype of the Tupolev Tu-144 flew for the first time on December 31, 1968, a few months before the prototype of the Concorde. But the Tu-144 flew fewer than 60 passenger flights and was retired in 1978. The Concorde, on the other hand, flew more than 40,000 flights between 1976 and 2003. The aircraft's maximum ceiling was 60,000 feet and its maximum speed was Mach 2.2 (about 1450 mph). At one time, a total of 20 planes were in service.

The only crash of the Concorde was on July 25, 2000. Air France Flight 4590 crashed on take-off from Paris with destination New York. The official report on the crash cites a Foreign Object of Debris (FOD) as the cause and not an inherent problem with the aircraft. The FOD in question was a titanium strip (3 cm by 50 cm), part of a thrust reverser, that fell from a Continental Airlines DC-10 which had taken off four minutes ahead of the Concorde.



Ninety-six Germans, two Danes, one Austrian, and one American died in the crash. Perhaps strange, perhaps not—the plane carried no French passengers. And although the official report was later disputed, two Continental mechanics and three others have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and, after nearly ten years, are going on trial today.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Crash / Landing

A crash landing at Newark came with the stunning image of yet another runway slide:



One of the rear sets of landing gear failed to open, and so the Airbus 319 had to touch down on the front and one rear set of wheels, and then skid to a stop on its wing-mounted engine. Sparks flew. Everyone survived, but one can only imagine the mindset of the passengers as the plane was on final approach.

And so we find ourselves back in Don DeLillo's White Noise, in which a plane is caught in a sharp descent, with no power:
Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn't this suggest that the two forms of flight termination were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter?