Eight Feet Deep

If you are one of the five or six peo­ple who reg­u­larly read this blog you may have noticed I didn’t write yes­ter­day. That is unusual because I usu­ally write some­thing dur­ing the week.

The rea­son was par­tially because of an on-the-job injury I sus­tained the day before and the bureau­cratic iner­tia that has pre­vented me, 46 hours later, from hav­ing seen a doctor.

The injuries aren’t seri­ous: an ankle sprain that now mostly hurts when I am stand­ing and a back strain. All of this was caused by the very dan­ger­ous com­bi­na­tion of walk­ing while per­form­ing math­e­matic cal­cu­la­tions on my cell phone. In short, I hit a wall. Lit­er­ally. My left hand hit the wall first, then my left knee and then my right foot. I fell back­wards, try­ing to turn in order to accom­plish a softer land­ing on my but­tocks. But I ended up flat on the floor. Ain’t that the s**ts?

Hope­fully all the paper­work can get filled out so I can get checked out by a doc-in-the-box later this after­noon. Oh well, it’s out of my hands.

I bet­ter pub­lish this as soon as I can, so … Adi­das ami­gos.  Per­haps a fast good­bye as in ten­nis shoes?

 This week­end at a high school reunion I found myself attempt­ing to encour­age an old friend who is a reluc­tant flyer. Patti said she would like to take a long flight to south­ern Europe but was uncom­fort­able with the idea of fly­ing such a long dura­tion. She noted that she didn’t even like to get to get up for a trip to the rest room while flying.

 While such a notion might sound silly to most who fly, it cer­tainly strikes a famil­iar chord within my recent mem­ory. I too was once a reluc­tant flyer. It was 25 years between the time I took my first air­line flight — from Hous­ton to Chicago en route to Navy boot camp — and the next one.

 The rea­son for that next flight in 1999, which was from Waco to St. Louis via Hous­ton, was to spend a week with an old friend and for­mer girl­friend. This friend had racked up the fre­quent flyer mileage in her work and she paid for my flight that way, so I fig­ured I should “man up” and take the trip.

 A tele­vi­sion show on one of the Dis­cov­ery or His­tory channel-type net­works ended up largely help­ing me to even­tu­ally con­quer my flight reluc­tance. The show went step-by-step through the inves­ti­ga­tion of a plane crash that killed a num­ber of pas­sen­gers and crew though not all. The fact that more and more peo­ple — in most instances that is — seem to sur­vive air­line crashes was encour­ag­ing although not com­pletely con­vinc­ing. But what gave me more com­fort through under­stand­ing was that this acci­dent stud­ied on the TV show and most oth­ers crashes are even­tu­ally found to occur as a cul­mi­na­tion of a set of inter­re­lated cir­cum­stances that hap­pened prior to the accident.

 Although no offi­cial report has yet been pro­duced by NTSB, it is likely that this A-to-B-to-C-to-D cause and effect — in reverse if you’d like to think of it that way — had to hap­pen for every­thing to go right so Capt. Sully Sul­len­berger could land his US Air­ways Flight 1549 safely into New York’s Hud­son River.

 Since 9/11/01 and the fol­low­ing month in which an Amer­i­can Air­lines Air­bus A300 jumbo jet crashed in the Rock­away sec­tion of Queens, New York, the U.S. saw one of the low­est num­bers of com­mer­cial air fatal­i­ties in recent years. No com­mer­cial car­rier deaths were reported in 2007 and 2008.

 So both lower num­bers of air­line crashes both in the U.S. and world­wide remains pos­i­tive news enough that it might con­vince my friend Patti to fly across the ocean. Of course, tak­ing an Ata­van some­time dur­ing the flight might do a world of good as well.

But then you have the inevitable fatal crash such as the Col­gan Air com­muter inci­dent in Buf­falo ear­lier this year. And just this week, a cou­ple of pilots of a North­west Air­lines Air­bus A320 who were said to be argu­ing over air­line pol­icy over­shoot their des­ti­na­tion by, only, 150 or so miles.

“Hey wait a minute! That doesn’t look like Min­nesota. I think we missed a turn.”

 Well, per­haps the crash in Buf­falo that killed 50 peo­ple includ­ing one per­son in a house couldn’t be helped. It cer­tainly wouldn’t be a sur­prise to learn that it could be helped though. But the inci­dent in which the pilots on the North­west flight — per­haps both pilots bear­ing the name Bozo, but just spec­u­lat­ing — thank­fully didn’t hurt or kill any­one but it seems more and more likely that their error could have been prevented.

Such inci­dents not only give more ammu­ni­tion to reluc­tant fly­ers but it also doesn’t instill con­fi­dence into the one-time reluc­tant fly­ers like myself or even the plain ol’ flyers.

 In wake of the “heated argu­ment” excuse, there has also been spec­u­la­tion that the pilots of the “missed the exit” flight might have fallen asleep or per­haps had even been “UI.” You know,  “DUI” or “BUI” or “FUI?” How­ever, The Wall Street Jour­nal reported today that the pilots of that air­craft claim they had chat­ted with a flight atten­dant and then pulled out their lap­top to dis­cuss their work schedules.

 “Hey, we landed the damn thing. What more do you want?”

 The good news is that they didn’t over­shoot the run­way, they just over­shot the air­port. But one can hardly call that good news either.

 For all the Ches­ley Sul­len­berg­ers and all the other sharp and super-competent pilots and air crew out there remains some with both their heads in the clouds as well as up their asses.

 These guys got their plane, crew and pas­sen­gers safely home. But their miss­ing the air­port the first time is a seri­ously bad reflec­tion on the Amer­i­can com­mer­cial air indus­try. Hope­fully the pilots of that North­west­ern will have time to think about their trans­gres­sions dur­ing a long vacation.

 Oh and as for my con­quer­ing my reluc­tance to fly, it didn’t hap­pen on the flight to St. Louis and it cer­tainly didn’t take place on the way back. We flew back into Waco on a “puddle-jumper” on a windy spring day. As our wings bounced on approach we took a very quick drop that would put car­ni­val rides to shame. The col­lege girl sit­ting next to me might have won­dered if my grip on the seat in front of her was going to break the head­rest into.

 But I even­tu­ally became more com­fort­able with fly­ing. Not totally — some­thing as huge as air­planes fly­ing still seem some­what unnat­ural to me — but with enough com­fort to sit back and look at how small the world looks below.