Disaster Man

In “Disaster Man: A conversation with William Langewische,” Books & Culture, March/April, 2007, pages 14-15, Wendy Murray interviews a leading journalist who specializes in airplane disasters. Langewische is also a pilot, so his love for airplanes and aviation comes through in his articles and books about air disasters. If you are interested in this topic, then this is a good article to read.

I liked his analogy of how flying gives you a perspective on the world:

“It's all about looking at the ground. All the patterns of life on earth are very exposed to the view from above. When you're in an airplane and you're looking down on the ground from above, it's very difficult for anybody to bullshit you. People build their front porches or plantations trying to impress the neighbors. Nobody is trying to impress pilots flying by. There is very little pretentiousness directed toward the sky. So you see things which are grand and glorious and wonderful, and things that are despicable. And you see them in their real relationship to one another.”

I also found his explanation of what he calls “suspended disbelief” interesting:

“I said in my book that pilots must learn against all contradictory sensations the discipline of absolute belief in their instruments. Our greatest weakness is that we still lack an instinctive sense of bank. It can induce deadly spirals. Instinct is worse than the useless in the clouds. The first challenge is to suspend disbelief and trust your instruments over instinct.

“In the chapter I wrote about the crash of Air India 885, a flight to Bombay in 1978, the pilots were disagreeing about which instrument was failing. I read the transcript of the black box. They had no horizon. It was a black night. Only one instrument was failing. They weren't all failing. There were other instruments that indicated which was right. The two main pilots were locked on their primary instruments, like tunnel vision, and a third pilot sitting behind them was looking at the instrument that was correct. He was saying, "No, that one!" The other guys should have seen it.”


You can read this article at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/002/13.14.html