Perhaps other readers, like myself, enjoy watching those ‘Mayday’ episodes. You know, those quasi-documentaries that re-create airplane disasters, showing the tragedy unfold in the first half, and then going through the forensic details that brought the plane down – like a nut that’s the wrong size or improperly fastened.
I especially like to give one or two of them a view before going on a plane, perhaps as some kind of masochistic immersion therapy. Face what you most fear! Every time I take off in a plane, I prepare for death, for even with some trust in Newtonian physics, modern engineering and pilots, and knowing the safety of air travel (many times safer than hurtling down the 401 at 70 miles an hour) I still can scarcely believe these behemothic beasts – some weighing up to a million pounds – can fly. I always say a Rosary – quietly and unobtrusively – as the plane takes off. I want to be clutching that sacramental should things so, shall we say, south.
The Mayday shows are not always tragic. The one I will post below demonstrates not only some of finest flying of which I have ever heard – the fruit of years of experience – but also grace and coolness under pressure. Every engine failed on the plane at over 30,000 feet, and Captain Bob Pearson, a seasoned sailpilot, had to glide – yes, glide – the multi-ton aircraft safely to the ground. A commercial airplane has a ‘glide ratio’ of about 20:1, which means they lose one foot of altitude for every twenty feet of distance. At cruising height, depending on various factors, can go about 100 miles, or about 22 minutes.
Does Captain Pearson make it? Well, watch and find out – it’s better than most films I’ve seen, a gripping tale, almost as gripping as the hold the pilot must have had on his controls. (There’s another twist in the plot, that has to do with Pierre Trudeau’s authoritarian imposition of the metric system on Canada in the 1970’s, an artificial and some might argue inhuman mode of measurement, devised in the distinctly inhuman French revolution. Back to imperial – inches, miles and gallons!).
One is reminded of the more recent accomplishment of Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, who glided his own plane safely onto the Hudson River, after a flock of geese flew into the engines – they’re not known for their intelligence, I suppose – and conked out all the engines.
No matter how advanced the technology – whether in flying, medicine, or engineering – we still rely upon human skill, experience and competency. Which is why the following episode form Matt Walsh is so disconcerting. Training and hiring pilots based on arbitrary criteria such as ethnic group or gender – checking off an arbitrary but strictly enforced ‘DEI’ quota – helps ensure that there will be fewer ‘Bob Pearsons’ in the future. It’s also no way to run a 150 million dollar finely tuned machine and an entire industry with many thousands of lives on the line. Apparently, they’re taking stewardesses and turning them – voila! – into aviators, which is sort of like going to the hospital cafeteria to find potential surgeons. The places to look for future doctors are amongst those excelling in rigorous science programs (along with moral probity – a question for another day).
Becoming a pilot requires not only many years of training and experience, but also an a priori natural desire, a zeal, if you will, that one must fly. At the very least, there should be some natural proclivity, and not just an vague ambition. Potential pilots are in aviation schools, the military, air cadets and so on.
It doesn’t matter who the pilot is, so long as he – or she – can fly the plane competently, not least in unexpected conditions. I know a family whose 20-year old daughter is a fully-certified commercial float-plane pilot. I recall her claim that she was better than many men with whom she flew. I want to believe her. In this historical moment of our culture, in the main, the best pilots are mostly middle-aged men who have gone through the ‘ranks’, so to speak, who have seen many things, been through the ringer, and lived to tell the tale. There’s a reason that in those Mayday episodes, they always give you the age, experience and flying hours of the pilots – including those on this particular aircraft.
I morbidly enjoyed the clip admitting that there’s an unofficial and unspoken policy of having an ‘older, experienced’ pilot always in the cockpit with the nervous newbie, to rectify things should they go cock-up. But such older pilots are getting long in the tooth and thin on the ground – or in the air, as the case may be. Many are boomers or Gen-Xers, and how long before there’s not enough of them, and more and more of those at the controls are DEI hires, who never really wanted to be pilots, cajoled into the job with promises of bigger pay and prestige? Sure, modern planes mostly fly themselves (which raises other difficulties, aptly described by Nicholas Carr in his The Glass Cage), but take-off and landing still require a good degree of human input, and emergencies do happen. Will anyone be there to take the controls when the wind shear hits the fans?
I don’t know how widespread this issue is, but the fact it even exists is troubling enough.
Keep those Rosaries handy the next time you’re in one of those glorified flying cigar tubes.
Saint Joseph of Cupertino, patron of aviators, and all Angels Guardian, orate pro nobis!
