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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
How Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wants to die, and is it OK to fix an airplane with tape?
Nov 19, 2004 | Readers expressed a certain befuddlement after I claimed to know of only two major disasters related to the failure of a plane's tail -- the crash of American Flight 587 in 2001, which touched off the whole conversation, and that of the Japan Airlines 747 in 1985.
"Didn't the Boeing 737 suffer a legacy of tail problems?" posed a reader, "resulting in at least one serious crash?"
Two crashes, to be more accurate: that of a US Air -- as it was then called -- flight near Pittsburgh in 1994, and a United flight at Colorado Springs three years earlier. The result of these mishaps was a drawn-out controversy over the design of Boeing's rudder control unit, culminating in a 2002 FAA directive ordering a rudder control retrofit of the entire 737 fleet. (No small task. The 737 has been in service since 1968, and has become the most popular jet airliner. In 2004, according to Air Transport World, just under 4,000 examples, of nine different series, operate commercially around the globe.)
I omitted these crashes, and several other nonfatal incidents of rogue rudders, because they differ from the sorts of structural failures we were talking about, i.e. whole tails, or sections thereof, separating from the fuselage.
It remains a fundamental aerodynamic axiom, by the way, that a plane will not stay in the air without its tail. How much of its tail, however, varies from event to event. Take a look at this, from 1944. They don't build 'em like they used to, maybe. That's a B-29, the workhorse Boeing bomber immortalized for its special deliveries to Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. (Anybody remember the song "Enola Gay," by the synth band OMD, early 1980s?)
"But doesn't the breaking of the jackscrew on the tail of that Alaska Air MD-80 qualify as a 'tail disaster?'" asks Jennifer McGowan, writing from North Carolina. She's referring to the February 2000 crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 that killed 88 passengers and crew.
Yes and no; mostly no. The jackscrew unit was in the horizontal stabilizer -- the small pair of aft-mounted wings that maintain stability around a plane's lateral axis, and to which the elevators (for nose-up/nose-down "pitch" control) are attached. In the case of the MD-80 -- and assorted others, from the 727 to the Tu-154 -- this assembly happens to sit atop the tail, but is not, strictly speaking, part of the tail itself.
When the jackscrew failed, Alaska 261 lost control of its horizontal stabilizers -- specifically their "trim" function, which fine-tunes the forces of pitch -- not its rudder, and there was no in-flight breakup. Thus, while I hate to nit-pick -- which is to say I love to nit-pick -- what happened in the Alaska Airlines tragedy was not a "tail" tragedy in the sense of American or JAL.
While we're at it, McGowan obviously never saw my column from about a year ago, the profoundly moving treatise wherein I petulantly address the more egregious misspellings of airline names. There is no such thing as "Alaska Air." Not to be outdone, another reader submits: "I seem to remember an Air Alaska aircraft that crashed due to a failure of a jackscrew in the tail."
What's wrong with you people? And why do you suppose the editors at Penguin snipped that particular lesson from my book?
Speaking of which, applause to Lisa Wixon of New York City, for accurately deciphering last week's stolen simile riddle. "A miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes," was the quote, appropriated from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. It appears in the introduction to Vonnegut's early short story collection, "Welcome to the Monkey House," published the same year the 737 debuted.
"Monkey House" is neither Vonnegut's best book (that'd be "Slaughterhouse Five"), nor the funniest one ("Deadeye Dick" or "Jailbird"), but the loaves and fishes line always stayed with me. Like so many of his sentences, it has that sort of ticklish profundity. Vonnegut was once kind enough to provide me with an autographed self-portrait.
Asked once in an interview how he'd most prefer to die, Vonnegut responded, "In a plane crash on Mount Kilimanjaro." The weirdly captivating romance, for lack of a better term, of such a death is grist for a future column, but Vonnegut seems to understand. If for no other reason than that, he became my favorite author.
Not that you asked, but the funniest books not written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. are Spalding Gray's "Sex and Death to the Age Fourteen" and, if you're looking for something truly and darkly hilarious, "Cold Dog Soup" by the novelist and poet Stephen Dobyns. I'm known to lift a Dobyns line here and there also.
But I digress.
