Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Why can't planes drive backward? Plus: In-flight fireworks, angry husbands, and what are the two best songs ever written about unemployment?
Jul 8, 2005 | On the night of June 30 I went to bed nervous. The column I'd just submitted, scheduled to run the following morning, would be Ask the Pilot's most ambitious installment to date -- a somewhat hair-raising and sentimental yarn involving a pretty girl, an airplane and another airplane. I'd really worn my heart on my polyester pilot's sleeve, and wasn't sure what to expect, envisioning a potential onslaught of ornery e-mails up to and including one from Dorothy Meyer's lawyer. (Or husband: "You cad! How dare you call my wife cadaverous and beautiful.") The next day I opened my mailbox and began scanning the subject lines for telltale signs that I'd overreached and made an idiot out of myself.
In the minds of some I may have, but the outpouring of kudos and commendations has been, to my pleasant surprise and considerable relief, unprecedented. Though possibly tempered by the light readership and generous moods of a holiday weekend, feedback was strong enough to make the story Ask the Pilot's best-received chapter in more than two years.
I bring this up not in the interest of self-congratulation or to justify future experiments of treacly indulgence, but as a way of thanking readers for having the courage to appreciate flight -- and writing about flight -- through a format that is perhaps more impressionistic and provocative than one might expect. The overarching point of this column is to inform, and always has been, but the occasional digression, I believe, keeps people thinking and helps instill the core topic of flying with the color and drama it surely deserves. If I insisted on presenting the facts and fancy of air travel in the timeworn, unwavering style of a "Wings" documentary, this series would have died a long time ago.
One aspect where last week's column did fall short, however, was in failing to draw old Dorothy Meyer out of the woodwork. The story feels oddly incomplete without some follow-up commentary from her side. There's still a chance she'll turn up, of course, to insist that I fabricated the whole thing and to deny having kissed me. A few reports have trickled in from people who once knew her, but the trail peters out in Seattle around the late 1990s. The picture these sightings paint is not unlike the one I imagined: Dorothy having shared a romance with a member of Pearl Jam, a life amid musicians and artists while holding down incidental jobs in bookstores or boutiques. The standard life drift for beautiful creative types.
Does that sound bitter?
And for the record, in my defense, I do not hold any unusual fondness for "The Love Cats" or any other song by Robert Smith and the Cure. For all its ultimate timeliness and irony, I did not ask that song to catch itself in my brain the morning of the incident in 1986. It simply happened, in that random, infuriating way of songs.
On that note, I'm reminded of the time I compiled a whole column of songs about flying, and there's a temptation to do another one. This time, though, it'll come with a twist, celebrating the darker aspects of flight. If "The Love Cats" is the official song of in-flight near-misses, we'd need representation for all the other sad realities of aviation: crashes, hijackings, lost luggage and airline bankruptcies. For instance, the two greatest songs ever written about unemployment are the Clash's "Career Opportunities" and the Jam's "Smithers-Jones." Thousands of laid-off airline workers would be able to commiserate with the sentiments of Strummer and Bruce Foxton (he, not Paul Weller, composed "Smithers-Jones"). The best of the bunch could then be marketed as a compilation CD called "Tailspins."
