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.