One of my heroes died on May 7th. His name was Denny Fitch, and I couldn’t have admired him more; I feel shamefully incapable of memorializing him, but fortunately one of my other heroes, Errol Morris, devoted an episode of his outstanding First Person series to Fitch and his role in the crash-landing of United Airlines Flight 232, in Sioux City, Iowa.

Fitch was a training-check-airman flying as a passenger, headed home to his wife and children, when the DC-10 suffered a catastrophe from which no airliner had ever recovered: the total loss of all flight-surface controls. The story of how Fitch and the flight crew responded to the task of landing an almost entirely uncontrollable jet airplane with nearly 300 people on board, how they considered landing on interstates, how their ground controllers told them they had no guidance because their situation wasn’t considered survivable, how they felt smashing into the ground, exploding, being thrown about as the plane burst into flames: it is a story only Errol Morris could coax, support, convey with the sort of power it merits.

Largely because of Fitch, 185 aboard survived, a fact one can hardly comprehend when one sees the video of the crash (at the start of the documentary above) or sees photos:

It is a sad story, of course, but it is also —why do I flush to say this?— an inspiring story, and I think of Denny Fitch and Al Haynes and the passengers often, often, often; I do not want to use them, recycle them into metaphor, but I cannot help it; theirs was a kind of crucible of crisis, problem-solving, fear and its overcoming. When I learned today that Fitch had died of brain cancer, I cried and cried. I hate that we vainly personalize others’ deaths this way, but all I mean is that he was really important to me and many thousands of others, and that the basic, attainable, direct, courageous, disciplined spirit he had seems to me more important than nearly all other forms of heroics.

I suppose I simply feel grateful to him, and I recommend Errol Morris’ short documentary highly.

At around four minutes and forty seconds into the video above, shot in 1956 from the USCGC Ponchartrain, a Boeing 377 successfully ditches into the Pacific after experiencing engine problems near the point of no return on a flight from Hawaii. As the wonderful X-Planes often notes, nobody died! The film has some delightfully hokey reenacted communication between the manned “Ocean Weather Station” and the pilot; there are also photographs of the water landing:

I came across this while failing to go to sleep last night; I’d searched for, then read about, San Francisco International Airport because I was driving the youngest Dalton brother there this morning, and quite naturally I was unable to stop myself from reading about various aviation incidents involving SFO.

My favorite -in keeping with my desire to survive without injury a horrifying aviation mishap- was the story of China Air Flight 006 (NTSB report here); if the idea of experiencing 5g forces in an out-of-control 747 plummeting upside-down for 30,000 feet before recovering and landing safely doesn’t excite you, it’s probably best that we not sit near one another on our next flight. Here’s a depiction of the descent.

Although all lived and the plane landed,

“The aircraft was significantly damaged by the aerodynamic forces. The wings were permanently bent upwards by two inches, the inboard main landing gear lost two actuator doors, and the two inboard main gear struts were left dangling. Most affected was the tail, where large outer parts of both horizontal stabilizers had been ripped off. The entire left outboard elevator had been lost along with its actuator, which had been powered by the hydraulic system that ruptured and drained.” (via)

To spend minutes certain that one would die in conditions which instill maximum terror and then to live seems an inestimable sort of experience. One wonders what one’s mind would do; a Vietnam veteran Marine on board described his rather calm reflections:

“I prayed harder than at any time of my life. On the one hand, I wondered what the impact would be like. But I also was congratulating myself for buying my ticket with my American Express card, which gives me $500,000 in life insurance. I figured that would just about cover the mortgage on my family’s house in St. Louis.”

Why was no commercial made from this? Would you have the presence of mind to ponder the looming impact? My experience of mild turbulence suggests to me that I would spend my final moments as I spend most of my time: reacting against and trying uselessly to control and direct my mind as it rampaged furiously from magical thinking to self-pity to dim-witted frustration.

Walker Percy, who’s something of a hero of mine, wrote often of suicide. In the hilarious and brilliant Lost in the Cosmos, he idly explored the liberating power of the genuine yet failed suicide attempt: oppressed by your despair, trapped in your collapsing psyche with its failed sense of scale, overwhelmed and lost, you fire a gun into your mouth, having checked the chamber and switched off the safety. Despite every intention of killing yourself, you fail: the gun jams, and after the ‘click’ which you expect to end your life you hear the hum of your air conditioner, perhaps a passing car.

Percy thought that this would precipitate a sudden release, a sense that you’d rejected life, opted out, but lived to reflect on it; there would be a kind of triumph. Knowing several suicides and not always being an ecstatic camper myself, I don’t know how generally this would be the case (if it would be at all), but there is something to the idea that confronting death exhilarates, restoring to you a sense of radical autonomy and selfhood. Hence daredevil sports, etc.

That’s why I am jealous as fuck of the people in this video (thanks, Kevin!). I have told dozens of people that one dream of mine is to experience a fatality-free plane crash, a doubly-unlikely fantasy, but one which I think would be extraordinary: the fear, the powerlessness, the physical terror, then: the sun, the grass, the air.