Sad­ness

The news caught my eye on Mon­day morn­ing. Maybe it is because we are trav­el­ers, maybe it is because we were going to fly from Rio de Janeiro to Paris a just few months ago (we even­tu­ally bused back to Buenos Aires), or maybe it is because it was an Air France flight. Who knows: some news just hit home.

The first press releases were quite mys­te­ri­ous. Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro had left Brazil at 19:00, local time. It was expected in Paris about eleven hours later and never made it. It sud­denly dis­ap­peared off air traf­fic con­trollers’ radar screens at about 1,000 kilo­me­ters from the Brazil­ian coast. Early Mon­day morn­ing, there was still some hope, mostly because planes have a kerosene reserve.

But a few hours later, the mood was low on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as it became clear the plane was not going to show up. Pas­sen­gers nation­al­i­ties were being released as offi­cials set up a cri­sis team in the Parisian air­port. There were 228 peo­ple on board, and none expected to be found.

I went to work and I couldn’t get the tragedy out of my head.

First, the fam­i­lies. Given the unex­pected nature of the dis­as­ter, the plane was first announced as “delayed”. Even­tu­ally, fam­i­lies, rel­a­tives and friends were told the truth. Can you imag­ine the night­mare of wait­ing for your loved ones at the air­port and find­ing out they would never be arriv­ing? The sud­den shock and the lives that were changed for­ever, in a sin­gle sec­ond? I can’t. The thought of it send shiv­ers down my spine.

The look on people’s faces at Roissy was one of dis­be­lief, help­less­ness and incom­pre­hen­sion. What hap­pened? Nobody knew for sure, which made the news even more dis­turb­ing. A lost plane? When we think of plane crashes, we think of land­ing or take-off crashes, and those are usu­ally, well, on land. Images of these acci­dents are shock­ing but there are real, here, right before our eyes. But what hap­pened above the Atlantic Ocean will remain some­what mys­te­ri­ous and unreal.

And I was think­ing of the pas­sen­gers too. Hope­fully, hope­fully, what­ever hap­pened hap­pened fast. But deep down, when the news first came out, I thought of a hor­ror flick I had seen a few years ago, Open Water. In the movie, a cou­ple of scuba divers are left behind stranded at sea because the tour oper­a­tor for­gets them. They try to sur­vive in the shark-infested waters, dehy­drated and scared.

And even if there was very lit­tle hope for the plane pas­sen­gers, I kept on think­ing of that movie. What if the plane crashed in the sea and poten­tial sur­vivors were stranded in the Atlantic Ocean? I prayed the res­cues would located the wreck­age quick enough.

The fol­low­ing day, parts of flight 447’s wreck­age were found 650 km north­east of Fer­nando de Noronha Island. These debris con­firmed the worst hypoth­e­sis: there were no sur­vivors and the place had indeed crashed into the ocean.

The cause of the crash remain unknown. Find­ing the black box won’t be an easy task since it must have sank pretty deep. Mean­while, there are so many hypoth­e­sis that it’s hard to know which ones are actu­ally likely: could the plane have been stroke by light­ning? Experts say that planes are designed to han­dle such events. Could it be just a com­bi­na­tion of unfor­tu­nate events, trig­gered by the weather?

Spec­u­la­tion is ram­pant. Sure, it is weird to see a plane dis­ap­pear, but I have very lit­tle patience for the usual con­spir­acy the­o­ries. A mete­orite, the aliens, a geo-magnetic hole (what the hell is that?), a cos­mic ray (same ques­tion), a por­tal to another dimen­sion… I read them all. We have this vis­ceral need to know and to under­stand, espe­cially when the news is shock­ing. Ratio­nal­iz­ing, imag­i­nat­ing, spec­u­lat­ing — we are all avi­a­tion experts suddenly.

I don’t know what hap­pened to flight 447. I doubt we will ever do. Nor that we will know how the pas­sen­gers and crew reacted and felt in these fatal few min­utes. We have to accept that we can’t under­stand and pre­dict every­thing. But we can feel sad and empathetic.

Related arti­cles:

1. G’Day, Syd­ney
2. Patag­o­nia — Punta Arenas
3. Get­ting There Is Only Half The Fun
4. Hello Can­cún!
5. Of a Flight Back Home