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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Media madness from Toronto: God, lightning and the quasi-crash of Air France flight 358.
Aug 12, 2005 | When Air France flight 358 went flailing into a ravine last Tuesday at Pearson International Airport, everything and nothing changed.
More than three and a half years had elapsed since the last major airliner crash on North American soil. Such marathons of fortune breed not only a sense of trust and security, but a certain hubris and delusive feelings of invulnerability. There were those of us who, after the passing of every accident-free day, eyed the morning's headline with a growing tension. Flying, as anybody could see, was safer than ever, and no single catastrophe was going to change that. But sooner or later the streak would be over.
Then came the French Airbus, barreling out of ink-dark thunder sky and onto the rainswept tarmac, and suddenly the string was out.
Or was it? After all, every one of the ship's 309 occupants made it to safety. Does the wreckage itself -- $100 million worth of shattered and flaming machinery -- reset the clock? Apparently it does. Despite lack of a death toll, the event garnered more attention than either of the commuter turboprop crashes that smear our otherwise perfect record dating back to autumn of 2001. Thirty-four people were killed in those events -- 21 in Charlotte, N.C., in 2003, and 13 more near Kirksville, Mo., last year -- but neither stole headlines for more than half a day.
Coverage from Toronto was expectedly maudlin. In the absence of any quantitative gore, the focus quickly shifted to heroics of the first responders and weepy interviews with passengers.
None of these segments was more nauseating than the melodrama presented by CNN's Aaron Brown last Wednesday evening. "Miracle" is a word plucked from context at considerable risk, and when a survivor made use of the term in an otherwise matter-of-fact reference, Brown seized, repeating the noun at least three times in a rich, groaning whisper of incredulity -- "a miracle." He wasn't shy about it, infusing the word with a boldly spiritual oomph. Brown's next guest may as well have been a Catholic priest. "Tell me, Father, did we witness a full-blown miracle in that Canadian gully?" The piece had everything except heavenly harp music and a choir of angels.
The pretense of supernatural intervention is tedious and insulting to those whose job it is to investigate airline accidents, and also to the thousands of victims of prior crashes who weren't so lucky.
And those aboard flight 358 aren't the only blessed ones. The annals of aviation are rich with near misses and unlikely survival. Possibly Brown has it backward: If you're going to play the miracle card, what of 4-year-old Cecelia Cichan, for instance, the only one of 155 passengers and crew to emerge alive from a Northwest Airlines MD-80 at Detroit in 1987? What of the four people who survived Japan Airlines flight 123, in which 520 others perished -- the worst single-aircraft accident in aviation history?
The question isn't why everyone in Toronto made it to safety, but how. You're free to credit anybody, from God of the Bible to the ghost of Charles de Gaulle, but I'll take the earthly road and tip my pilot hat to the Air France cabin crew, and also make note of the many safety enhancements on the state-of-the-art A340 -- flame resistant cabin furnishings, for one -- that helped supply ample time for escape.
For those prone to ignore the babble of the pre-flight safety demo, Toronto should be lesson enough to adjust your habits and start paying attention. At the very least, know where the exits are. (Indeed, many of the questions and answers addressed in this space over the past three years were manifest in the final careening seconds of flight 358: Why must my window shades be up? Why must the tray tables be stowed, and the seats fully upright? Why are the cabin lights dimmed? And so on.)
