Journalists miss civilian air crashes. They can’t and won’t tell you this, of course. That would be in macabre bad taste, all the worse in a politically correct era. Instead, they’re forced to bemoan wars, which they secretly adore — the longer, the better — or viciously ugly presidential campaigns like the one shaping up in the United States. The horror! They wince, all the while suppressing inner glee.
Still, nothing’s quite like an air crash.
Why?
It’s sudden, usually total, often without explanation, and frequently involves citizens of many nationalities, letting all media into the act.
It’s also great for footage of wreckage, body bags, wailing by relatives. If it’s over water, so much the worse, unless of course there’s floating wreckage, even floating bodies, the ultimate pornography of crashes.
It’s sudden, usually total, often without explanation, and frequently involves citizens of many nationalities, letting all media into the act.
In 1982 an Air Florida jet crashed on takeoff in the dead of winter in Washington, D.C., striking a city bridge and several occupied vehicles. A survivor (who later drowned) swam to safety, rescuing passengers.
My paper, the Washington Star, had closed, but I still vividly remember my former editor cursing her luck that she’d missed the crash. “God, but that would have been a great time!” she told me from her New York exile.
These days, flying is so safe, Israel and Russia need to make up for the air crash hole, and even they can’t really compete.
Think of the last great crash years, 2014 and 2015.
In the first of those years, not one but two Malaysian jets made headlines. The first vanished over the Indian Ocean in what remains the most mysterious crash–non-crash in aviation history. Its disappearance is up there with Amelia Earhart’s. More than a decade later, the clues are few. The fate of the flight made headlines for months and is debated today. Then came the second crash, this one all too visible, a shoot-down over Ukraine attributed to pro-Russian rebels. There was hand-wringing, but also endless fascination and condemnation, foremost by the Dutch, who lost the most citizens.
But nothing recent trumps the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, in which an unstable pilot drove his Airbus into the French Alps, killing 150. No glitch. No storm. No door blowout or Boeing-style meltdown. Just your average lonesome madman. Media eat these events for breakfast, lunch, and several helpings of dinner.
Time was when such madmen weren’t rarities. A Japan Airlines captain plunged his jet into Tokyo Bay, and a death-wish Egyptair first officer dove his Boeing into the Atlantic late last century (though Egyptian authorities disputed this contention). Again, interest was massive. As it was for the infamous Lockerbie flight, a Pan Am 747 blown apart over Scotland by a Libyan bomb. Lots of Americans on that one, giving early CNN a field day. Much the same for a TWA flight to Paris that exploded over the Atlantic in 1996, leading to heaps of terrorist speculation but (despite months of TV finger-pointing at Islamic militants) a probe yielded no smoking gun. It was the plane’s own volatile jet fuel that detonated.
In the post-9/11 era, and before Germanwings, it was the crash of an Air France jet from Rio to Paris in 2009 that attracted the most ferocious attention. Again, terrorist suspicions came first until investigators ultimately cited multiple factors including pilot error and icing of sensors. Media of course sent choppers aplenty to the remote scene, most feasting on bobbing debris. For a long second, the world of the Iraq War was placed on hold.
I could add many more doomed flights, but I’ll begin to wrap this up with what in my view is the most terrifying of them all, JAL Flight 123, a 1985 domestic flight involving a Boeing 747. After an explosive decompression, causing oxygen deprivation in the pilots at times, the plane lost rudder function. As a result, the compromised aircraft was forced to circle aimlessly for a half-hour until it crashed in mountainous terrain, killing 520.
“One American is worth 10 Japanese and 50 Pakistanis.”
Yes, 520.
In the time it took to crash, and this of course was the pre-mobile phone era, many wrote farewell notes.
There is no crash quite like it, and yet few mentioned it at the time. These were, after all, Japanese folk on a routine flight. The Western press simply couldn’t find an angle, aside from the crash and the astounding number of dead.
Likewise, with the 1988 downing of an Iranian Airbus by U.S. surface-to-air missiles, killing 290 civilians, a blunder few Europeans and even fewer Americans mourned.
These disasters, particularly JAL 123, reminded me of what my first wire-service editor told me, with equal doses of scorn and realism: “One American is worth 10 Japanese and 50 Pakistanis.” In disaster, your tribe was the tribe that mattered, and sometimes it was the only tribe.
This isn’t to say he didn’t wait for the Great Italian Crash. He did. He imagined debris landing on St. Peter’s.
Never happened. But even with my vision compromised, I keep my eyes trained upward. A boy-turned-journalist can dream.
