De Plane! De Plane!

With one breath.
With one flow.
You will know.
Synchronicity.
- The Police

In my recent time of leisure, I've been reading books and watching movies in such volume, I'm sure that the voluminous amount of material I've been checking out of the library is going to put me on one or more of John Ashcroft's lists.

By sheer coincidence, I read and watched four things about aircraft accidents in a row. I'm not sure if this is a Synchronistic warning to not get on a plane anytime soon, or what.

Take this time to familiarize yourself with the safety devices on the aircraft. Your seat is a flotation device. Note the emergency exits and the fore, aft, and over the wing of the aircraft. Should you feel uncomfortable or feel you are unable to release the door in event of emergency, please alert your flight attendant and you will be moved to a more appropriate seat, and really, we won't think you're a wuss. Thank you for flying Third Level Digression airlines, and we hope you have a pleasant trip.

TLD: I don't recall on which airline or aircraft I discovered this, but printed boldly on the bottom of the emergency instructions card was this helpful tip: "If you cannot read these instructions, please notify your flight attendant."


Soul Survivor by Dean Koontz
The first in the series of the unintentional theme of my readings. A man's wife and children are killed in crash so violent, the impact crater goes all the way down to the bedrock, which cracked. Naturally, the debris of the airplane was comprised of chunks no larger than a hubcap. It's another of Koontz's well-drawn thrillers and a fun read. (I've noticed that either Stephen King or Dean Koontz kinda copies the plots of the other, perhaps in an attempt to do it better. Anyway, this is Koontz's "Firestarter".)

Airframe by Michael Crichton
The best of the bunch. I've always been a Crichton fan, but this is one of his best, if not the best. And it's more or less about the investigation into an incident of "severe turbulence" on a commercial aircraft! That's it! How Crichton made this such a gripping page-turner, I'll never know. He does deviate from his standard character set (brooding, alpha-daddy male scientist; bitch on wheels, borderline lesbian female scientist; jr. scientist of any gender who's insecure but who does most of the real work), and maybe that helped make it better than his usual work. The character of the young female TV news magazine segment producer was my favorite because she's such an evil, ambitious cretin whose pet peeve is boy toys who won't go home after they've serviced her. Ha!

Stiff by Mary Roach
One section deals with using cadavers for testing crash safety stuff, and what is learned by examining bodies, or parts thereof, after an actual crash. PETA MEMBERS LOOK AWAY NOW! There's also a grimly amusing passage on how they canon guinea pigs into the water to see at what force and how their little lungs explode, evidently one of the more common results of a severe crash into water. This brought back images of Berke Breathed's Mary Kay Commandos for me, for some inexplicable reason.

Airplane
It was good to revisit this old classic after all of the above. This movie has aged well, though some of the commercial parodies will go over the heads of the under thirtysomething crowd. If you've only seen this on commercial TV, you are missing about 1/4 of the really good jokes, not to mention the topless stranger who jiggles past the camera at one point, which renders even one of the directors speechless on the commentary track.

So, I'm not getting on a plane for a while if I can help it. Even with terrorism, SARS, and the aging fleet (the most common theme amongst the books, btw), not to mention the Republican deregulation of most of the safety organizations and the rout of the air traffic controllers back in Reagan's day, which we still haven't really recovered from, it still may be statistically safer than many daily activities, but any death where you get to draw a breath and scream some more is just not one that I would choose.

(Note to self: This entry kinda sucks. Try harder in the future. I know you spent two weeks hammering at this thing and this is all you could manage. Still, let's strive for more, huh?)