Flying

Just last week on the plane to Jeju Island, I was explaining to my girlfriend that the 'water landing procedure' safety pamphlets are useless, other than to give people a creative kickstart for when they start pondering what to do if the plane goes down. See, when we're flying that high looking down on the vast ocean we want to know that there's a plan, should the plane come across an above-water emergency. Above-land situations are intuitive, because the jet is supposed to land on hard ground; in an emergency, maybe it could land on a highway, or a big field, or wherever. This is what we tell ourselves. But water landings are not intuitive this way, and we need some kind of line-of-thought for how we'd handle them. We all think this stuff, no? (Personally, I fantasize about being the hero, pulling gorgeous young women to safety out of the wreckage, then modestly saying "don't call me a hero" to Larry King a few days later.)

So, to help out, they give us a pamphlet explaining how the jet will come to a healthy stop on the water (fully intact!) and we'll all slide out to safety with our lifejackets on.

And as I was saying to my girlfriend, when has that ever happened, in the history of jet crashes? Every time there's an ocean jet crash in the news, all they can manage to recover are mangled chunks of metal usually no larger than your average cardboard box flap. They're lucky to find so much as the black box, and everyone is always "presumed" dead by the news anchor, because none of the bodies are even found.

(I think one could say that as a rule, if you are officially "presumed" dead, you probably didn't die well.)

But today, I see a story on the front page of every news website!: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D95NSD6G0&show_article=1


Well, there it is, a fully intact jet that made an emergency water landing today in New York's Hudson river. Slides, lifejackets, the works. All 155 people survived. If there's anything that pilot's wife has always refused to do in bed, I'm sure she'll do it for him now.

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Anonymous said…
I KNEW IT! Never say never. :P
8:30 PM
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