“I’m not bothered about flying,” is one of my favourite comments, almost certainly subconsciously pilfered from someone else. “It’s crashing I’m bothered about.” Even that’s not true these days, having all but conquered my fear of flying. Nowadays, I am able to adopt a ‘whatever will be, will be‘, ‘it is what it is” type attitude, as I delve into my Bumper Book of Clichés. But on the first morning of a recent trip ‘across the pond’, I awoke to a message asking: “Did you fly out on a Dreamliner?”
As it happened, the first part of my flying journey was indeed aboard a Boeing 787 Dreamliner and apart from Air Canada’s usual dismal in flight service it was an excellent experience. Seated before the bulkhead, I had extra leg space and, crucially, two enormous cabin windows to look down on the clouds that seemed to cover the entire Atlantic Ocean and later north east Canada. At no point was I remotely concerned about air safety. Until that message arrived.
Reaching sleepily for my mobile phone, I soon found out why my partner, for it was she, had asked the question: an Air India Dreamliner, flight AI171, had crashed shortly after take off from Ahmedabad, killing everyone on board, except it later turned out, one man.
My first thought was not: OH MY GOD. THAT COULD HAVE BEEN ME. It was more of a: blimey, how awful. And my thoughts were with the dead and their families and friends.
Naturally, Canadian TV news led on the tragedy and showed a video of said Air India plane climbing from the airport but then sinking back to the ground before being engulfed in fire and smoke. The video was shown repeatedly and, as with the footage from 9/11, it is hypnotic viewing – until you remember you are watching a lot of people dying in awful circumstances.
Just hours after the crash, TV anchors are filling space by talking with experts and asking them what may have happened. And you know from the outset that the genuine answer to every question is “I don’t know“. However, this does not prevent anyone from saying that “we should avoid speculation” before speculating on what may have happened. Honestly, CBC might as well have invited me on to say precisely nothing at all because that’s what the experts were doing.
Having said that, I have speculated, too. Modern aircraft do not simply fall out of the sky, except when they do. And of course there is an undercurrent that suggests that, ‘Well, it did happen in India‘, nudge, nudge; wink, wink. But like everyone else, except the flight investigation teams, I have absolutely no clue as to what happened.
A week later, I flew back to Old Blighty, again on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. As I squeezed into my seat in cattle class, was I at all concerned about making it home in one piece? Well, since no airline, including Air India, has grounded a single Dreamliner since the crash, the honest answer was, no, I was not concerned. Yes, I was aware that I was about to fly on the type of plane that crashed a week before, so I did at least think about it, but as soon as I had settled into what was already close to the ‘brace, brace, brace‘ position because of the confined nature of Air Canada’s seating arrangements, I was more concerned about the possibility of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) or my back seizing up.
Having managed to scrape together some two hours of fractured sleep – a record for me on a transatlantic flight – I was more concerned about the abysmal quality of Air Canada’s breakfast (a slice of squishy cake and a yogurt: I was so hoping for a full English) than I was about landing on one piece. Frankly, modern day flying is a piece of (squishy) cake these days and entirely event-free. The shocking news from India left me sad but I never once thought: I hope this doesn’t happen to me tonight.
We will learn soon enough as to why AI171 crashed and I’ll leave the idle speculation, which does exist in a small part of my already small brain, to others. People die in car crashes every day and that won’t stop me driving to Sainsbury’s later on to purchase the things I forgot to order in last week’s on-line shop, so why should I be bothered about flying? I’m not bothered about flying and in truth I’m not bothered about crashing, either. Whatever will be, will be; indeed.
