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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Giant nets to stop a brakeless Concorde? Just one of Hollywood's ham-handed attempts to fly. Plus, why icing on a plane is a slippery business.
Feb 7, 2003 | As expected, my mailbox was the target of alternating shots of praise and indignation after last week's book recommendations. But give me some credit for separating at least a cracker's worth of wheat (served in a tiny basket with an apple and a soapy towelette) from all the chaff.
It would have been more fun, maybe, compiling a list of my least favorite books. The literature of flight is a congested and overburdened genre, as the pages of industry catalogs can attest. If ever there was an argument against freedom of the press, it's the pulp churned out by the small companies who dominate aviation publishing. When they finally get around to re-regulating the airlines, maybe they should throw reins over the presses as well, slowing the cataract of shoddily written memoirs and the depressing assortment of would-be coffee table fare (one book is actually called "A Guide to Airport Airplanes").
At the more cultivated end, of course, we discover yet another installment of that beauty-of-flight manifesto known as Ask the Pilot.
And in light of my earlier poetry samples, who knew the "Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry" would register no fewer than 20 entries under "Airplanes," 14 more for "Air Travel," and at least another five under "Airports." Names here don't include Smith, but do include Frost and Sandburg. (And I specifically recall an Allen Ginsberg poem in which he writes of the blue taxiway lights at an airport somewhere. Anyone know it?) John Updike's "Americana and Other Poems" was reviewed by Kirkus as "a rambling paean for airports and big American beauty."
As for other media ... Well, we've we've done music already -- I've listed Hüsker Dü songs and waxed a bit over "Rhapsody in Blue" -- so maybe Hollywood warrants a mention.
It's debatable whether movies better lend themselves to the topic than other forms of art, but if they do, it is perhaps due to the film industry's having achieved a certain glamorous bloom simultaneously with commercial flight. One might parallel the 1950s' dawn of the Jet Age with a realized potential of Hollywood -- the turbojet and CinemaScope as archetypal tools of promise. But decades later there still appears to be some cordial symbiosis at work: A lot of movies are shown on airplanes, and airplanes are shown in a lot of movies.
You're expecting me to say so, but yes, I find myself roiling in frustration at Hollywood's artistic license with the facts of flight. I'll refrain from playing film critic lest I sound like an anal-retentive crank, but the most embarrassing thing I ever saw was "Airport '79" (John Davidson, Jimmie "J.J." Walker, Charo), which even in the 7th grade had me choking with incredulity at the idea of using giant nets to stop a brakeless Concorde from speeding off the end of a runway.
The crash plot is the easy and obvious device. But although we might theorize what part of the shattered fuselage those Uruguayan rugby players ("Survive," 1975) used as an abattoir when preparing their deceased teammates for consumption, the most thoughtful moments are when airplanes appear incidentally: the requisite farewell airport scene (always departing, never arriving), the silhouette of a 747 climbing away; the propeller plane dropping the spy off at some godforsaken shithole, or taking the ambassador and his family away from one; the beauty of the B-52's tail section snared in a tree along the riverbank in "Apocalypse Now."
"Did you catch the Tupolev TU-154 in Krzysztof Kieslowski's 'Decalog, part IV'?"
"Yes, and there was an IL-18 in the background."
"You're right. [Wistfully] I wonder where the Tupolev was headed?"
"Dresden, perhaps?"
"No, Budapest, I'll bet! Maybe Prague? I'll check my 1987 LOT timetable to see where any midday Tupolevs were going from Warsaw."
For most of us, airplanes are a snapshot means to an end and, often enough, the vessels of whatever exciting, ruinous, life-changing journeys we may embark on as human beings. There's romance in that, but the furtive glimpses capture it best, far more evocatively than any blockbuster disaster script.
