THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607260082
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Comment
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: 79 lines
MY SISTER BRITT called me from Washington's National Airport, where she was killing time. Her Delta flight to Cincinnati had been delayed by thunderstorms in Atlanta, the jet's origin.
We spoke for a half-hour, about family, flying, summertime plans. Pleasant enough. But each time a metallic background voice announced a departure, Britt tensed up. Airport anxiety.
When we disconnected, I had one of those horrible thoughts that you chase from your mind: That could have been the last time I ever spoke to Britt. Ever.
Britt later told me that as she settled into her seat on the airplane, she thought: ``Poor Ann. If the plane crashes, she'll be the last person to have talked with me.''
That was May 11. Minutes later I learned that ValuJet Flight 592 had gone down in the Florida Everglades, killing 110 people.
There's a hushed fatalism attached to air travel, all air travel, whether it's discount, like the fast-start-up ValuJet, or high-priced, top commercial, like Delta or Trans World Airlines. I often think of a line from a '60s comedy routine by Bill Cosby.
Upon boarding, the comedian said, he would call out: ``Hope the plane don't crash!'' Thus finding laughter in white-knuckled anxiety.
Some of the 230 people killed July 17 in the explosion of TWA Flight 800 may have spoken to sisters on the phone, as Britt had with me, before they boarded. They were on their way to Europe! New York to Paris. I've flown the route.
Flight unites us all. In work and play. In faith and grief.
It is also out of our control.
We can research the safety record of airlines and comparison-shop, and we can challenge airport security measures, both the technology and the personnel, but when disaster occurs in the air, we are helpless. Subject to someone else's error.
Some of us respond to such fatalism by denying or diminishing it: Why else express confidence in ValuJet, as many did in opinion polls, within a week of the crash and before knowing its cause?
Surely in this age of deregulation, no one believes the Federal Aviation Administration is all-knowing and all-powerful. (As we've since discovered, the FAA has been promoting the same airlines that it's charged with regulating!)
And it is just as easy to think that if a mistake happens once, it can happen twice, rather than that the airline will be extra-vigilant in the aftermath of a crash.
Others, like myself, acknowledge the fatalism and try not to dwell on it. I and members of my family have flown hundreds of times, without serious mishap. But I worry each time.
I find it curious that some people hope the explosion of Flight 800 was caused by ``mechanical failure'' rather than by an act of terrorism. Somehow a breakdown in maintenance is more comforting to them than the perceived ``randomness'' of a bomb planted in the cargo hold.
But from the passenger's perspective, mechanical failure - an unknown - is no less ``random.'' And it is far less predictable.
And if a malfunction can cause destruction on the order of the Challenger, where's the security?
I dare say none of the passengers aboard ValuJet's flight 592 imagined that within six minutes of takeoff, he or she would be gasping for breath. Then free-falling 7,000 feet to certain death. Oxygen canisters? Disney World was on their minds.
Innocence.
And the TWA passengers, happily bound for long-anticipated vacations or for home, hardly conceived of a bomb ending their flights and lives after 12 minutes in the air.
Is it better to deny the fatalism? The horror?
No, it's better to acknowledge and to grieve.
The night of the Everglades crash I called Britt, an air-travel bargain hunter, in Cincinnati. ``No more ValuJet,'' I told her. ``I can't stand it.''
She didn't argue.
Today, in the wake of the TWA atrocity, I remember Cosby. ``Hope the plane don't crash.'' MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is a lawyer and book editor for The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB