A year ago next week, Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger landed his US AIrways safely in the Hudson.
In the current NYRB, James Salter reviews William Langewiesche’s Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson. Salter, in addition to being a fine fiction writer, is a pilot, and knows whereof he writes:
Fly by Wire is a story with two heroes, one of them the pilot of the stricken plane, and the other the man who had been responsible for the advanced control concepts of the airplane itself, an Airbus A320
Growing up, I remember engineer-relatives voicing great and possibly patriotically-inspired suspicion of Airbus automation, but the crash pictured above—not during takeoff, as labeled, but at an airshow with passengers on board, who’d been informed only that they were going to be circling Mont Blanc—occurred not, Salter writes, because of automated features, but because the pilot had disengaged them.
I hesitated initially about posting the video, just as it took me three years to bring myself to watch United 93. It’s a little too close to drone porn. To rubbernecking. Almost everyone survived the airshow crash, which at least tempers that significance. Somewhat. But I’m suspicious of the impulse to look away, the get-closure-get-happy-power-of-positive-thinking Oprah, Norman Vincent Peale, mega-church “what, me worry?” sensibility.
At one point in Evening the dying Anne Lord—or, Susan Minot, because Anne doesn’t really articulate it—feels separate from everyone around her not because she’s old, ill and dying, but because experiencing those things makes her aware of how people in the ‘prime of life’ go about their business as if it’s never going to end.
The first word that ‘airplane’ brings to mind for me is ‘flight’; the second is ‘crash.’
In the clip, the Airbus glides so smoothy into the forest, it upends our expectation of disaster. Crashes are supposed to be jarring, sudden—brace yourself for impact. In The Year Of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes that the death of her husband, in mid-sentence, over a glass of scotch, reminds her of the framing of accounts of 9/11:
“It was just an ordinary beautiful September day,” people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.”
I think we habitually conflate “ordinary” with “exempt,” as emergency will be announced by that damned Carmina Burana movie trailer chorus or the nerved-up string section in the Bourne movies. In that sense, there is no “ordinary.” I think that may be what we turn away from. This fascinated Auden:
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Brueghel flips the convention of his time. Instead of catastrophe—the crucifixion, the slaughter of the innocents—taking center stage, with a dog pooing or children skating in the corner, he puts the catastrophe off to the side. Dum de dum. Nothing to see here.
Watching disasters—videos of crashes, photos of wrecks, “the humanity, oh the humanity”—we feel it’s proper to look away. Looking at Brueghel’s ploughman, who does just that, we’re horrified. Look! How can you do anything but look?
