plane human
Bile snakes through my stomach to my throat. I am not as brave as I thought. I love flying, I said. I like the feeling of being nowhere in particular, I said, and, yet, a few moments of extreme turbulence and courage vanishes as clouds over wings. My heart hammers in my chest and I hold the hand of my neighbor, immediately and instinctively, thinking, "so this is how it is, when a plane crashes..."
No one wants to die alone.
It was primal--this need to reach out for another human being, to take the hand nearest me as a witness to my life, as a witness to death. It was a sweaty hand: every drop of sweat speaking to anxious thoughts of death and fears of life yet to live. All that in a second, all that in a palm.
As American Airlines flight 965 made its way into a mountain in Buga, Colombia, on December 20, 1995, Mercedes Ramirez Johnson, grabbed her father’s hand and he returned in kind, holding on tightly--a firm, desperate grip. She put her head in her lap and closed her eyes. When she came to, she was disoriented and saw “everything in pieces” around her, but was her father still holding her hand? She doesn’t say and I feel heartless in my need to know, to have it improve my story: the cold hand of my dead father remained fixed in mine.
One of the most renowned sole survivors of a commercial aircraft crash is Bahia Bakari, a 13-year-old girl who survived the crash of an Airbus A310 on June 30, 2009. Rescuers plucked her from the Indian Ocean off the Comoros Islands after she literally clung to a piece of crash detritus for her life as she bobbed in the ocean for over nine hours. When initially asked about her ordeal, she said she thought she alone had fallen from the plane, from pressing her head too hard against the window. She thought, "Mom is really going to be angry with me." When Mom never arrived to scold her, the gravity of the situation seeped in, as her pruned, water-logged body ached in recovery, she realized, she had not fallen alone.
When pressed for details about her trauma, she said, “They told us to fasten our seatbelts because we were about to crash. Next thing I remember is feeling an electric shock in the water.” Note, she doesn’t recall the moments before the crash, nor the moment of impact. This is what I want. Did strangers hold onto each other as I? Did people cry and scream? (Of course.) Did they laugh? Did they pray? Curse? Fight? Did someone piss themselves? Shit themselves? Vomit? I want all the details. I want to know how people act moments before imminent, near certain, death, to bore into the trauma like a drill in softwood (sweet pine smell), a gentle and painful exploration, not the coarse and unforgiving destruction of a drill to concrete; I do not wish to echo the traumatic event.
Do we come together in our shared humanity?
There are not many accounts from survivors detailing the actual act of crashing. The brain protects the mind from horror—it has a way of dealing with traumatic inevitability, a way of protecting itself from its own demise. Dominica McGowan, a survivor of British Midland flight 92, near Kegworth, Leicestershire in the UK, on January 8, 1989, thought she’d remained conscious throughout, but was told she couldn’t have. She doesn’t remember coming to, only blackness and becoming aware that the plane, or what was left of it, had come to a stop.
This is really getting in the way of my story.
Wendy Robinson was a flight attendant on Delta Airlines Flight 191, a Lockheed L-1011-385-1, which crashed on August 2, 1985 while approaching the Dallas Fort Worth airport. At the first big drop, Robinson recalls, “everyone gasped,” and she started praying out loud. She could not hear screams, she said, only the sound of screeching metal. Okay, so people pray and scream in times of distress, this is not news, but do they hold hands together and pray? I imagine they do. They must. A life needs attesting. I held the hand of my neighbor as the plane dropped. I wanted to be seen, validated as a human being. The hand holding was an act of protest, a way of saying, “I matter,” in the face of death, I exist still.
Gil Greene, a passenger on that same flight, prayed as he heard screams. Horrifically, the passengers in his row had to make a split-second decision as a fireball rushed towards them: stay in their seats and be incinerated, or jump out while the plane was moving in an attempt to flee the flames. I wonder, though, if this was really a decision, or classic fight, flight or freeze instinctual response. Did those who remain in their seats choose to do so? Greene claims he did as he watched some of his fellow passengers unbuckle their seatbelts and try to escape the oncoming inferno only to be sucked out of the plane and killed. He saw the remaining passengers in his row, all soaked in jet fuel, burn to death, one by one. Sources do not make it clear how Greene managed to survive.
Cockpit recordings confirm the last words of the pilot were, “Oh, shit!” Prayer and profanity: totally reasonable responses to imminent death. I want more.
Robinson claims to remember the details of the crash, but chooses not to comment on them. Her brain did not shut out the trauma; she chooses not to comment on it. This pisses me off. How dare her trauma get in the way? A good story, boundless creative license above compassion--this is the level of self-servitude we are dealing with here.
Screams. Gasps. This is truly primal and totally unsurprising. Did people gasp in unison? Did the screams echo off one another? Each scream speaking to the next: I am here. A cacophony of protest.
Or an eerie quiet? Each person with their own regrets, sitting, waiting, a silent tear or two. Upton Rehnberg, a survivor of United Airlines flight 232 that crashed in Sioux City, Iowa on July 19, 1989, recalled, “It was quiet. I remember taking off my tie - I don't know why. I put my reading glasses in my shirt pocket, tied my shoelaces and waited.”
Calm while facing your own mortality may be anti-intuitive, but calm and perhaps blind luck may have been the thing to save Rosebell Kirungi’s life. She recalls, “Some of the others went through the windscreen, but I was still strapped in my seat, with no injuries - the only thing I had lost were my shoes.” Kirungi, the sole survivor of a small chartered flight crash in the Rwenzori Mountains, Democratic Republic of Congo on September 25, 1998, recalls people panicking as the pilot announced he was losing control of the plane. She prayed, and remained very calm and determined, for which she credits her faith. Kirungi watched her flight mates either die shortly after the crash, or disappear into the jungle as they walked seeking help. By the ninth day of walking through the jungle, she was alone. She was finally rescued on the tenth day. On her over 100 mile walk, she developed gangrene. Her legs were amputated below the knee. Kirungi not only still enjoys flying, but founded Limbsworld, a charity in her native Uganda that rehabilitates and retrains Ugandan amputees.
I get away from the crux. Or do I? Miraculous survivor tales, especially with a redemptive ending, are nice, sure. Humans are generally stronger after facing the impossible. Trauma, if we can get to the other side, escape its consumption, offers sublime reward: Gratitude. Gratitude morphing to positive change. Positive change rubbing against another human to spread its nascent seed in subtle plague fashion. This, too, is a primal act. This, too, is a way of claiming our humanness. We act on another. We do this with and without intention. My hand, as it reaches for the stranger in the seat next to me, tossing in a massive tin can at 39,000 feet, is a means of assertion. I am here through screams, terror, prayer, nervous laughter, quiet. The details simply add color, complicate the basic connectedness of us. I do not let go of her hand until we are steady. The residual heat of her palm in mine comforts me. A fading reminder that I am.