Today I thought about death. Standing before the immense fuselage and the long wings of anodized aluminum, sheltered by the distant echo of jet engines and the announcements that the PA system buries under ambient noise, I thought about the material and concrete possibility of dying, today.
I’ve never been particularly afraid of flying; in fact, I’ve always considered myself an aviation enthusiast. Even so, struck once again by the titanic and vaguely monstrous presence of the steel night-owl that must carry me home for the umpteenth time in a few hours, I realized that perhaps I harbor a silent anxiety about this whole business of being far from the ground—a lingering dread that most of the time I manage to ignore placidly, but which today, for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint, hit me squarely. Nor would I say I’ve ever had a serious or clinically relevant fear of death. Nonetheless, there is a very characteristic unease that perhaps has or hasn’t to do with airports, in fact, but which is certainly tied to the dread that surfaces when death ceases to be an arithmetic abstraction and manifests as a living, physical, and in some way imminent possibility—one that, it seems to me, affects us all more or less upon realizing, if only momentarily, that death is an independent phenomenon existing in its own right.
For there are as many fears as there are reasons to suffer, but very few do so in the same way as the sudden, visceral recognition that much of what we take for granted, so many structures we blindly trust without understanding them, could simply collapse.
For instance, that the Boeing 737-800 operating today’s flight FR7897 from Luton to Barcelona has been correctly inspected by the ground crew (a workforce that, as is well known, operates under conditions of severe precarity and almost always clocks overtime, which, according to strict ICAO regulations, makes absolutely no practical difference, though it feels worth mentioning, if only for the sake of mentioning it). That, once the thrust levers are pushed to the limit and the powerplant begins to hum, the “apparatus” (sic) will advance down the shiny, damp, black asphalt, hit V1 (around 150 knots according to FAA manuals, assuming we carry a relatively normal fuel load), and take off without any upheaval. That the first officer, probably not very experienced and roughly my own age, recently graduated from an entirely average flight school (which, strictly adhering once again to ICAO regulations, also makes no practical difference, though it feels worth mentioning, if only for the sake of mentioning it), will carry out the relevant checks; and that the captain (who needn’t be, but whom I like to imagine as a man who once dreamed of flying for American Airlines or Lufthansa, of commanding the transatlantic skies with a great wide-winged bird, but who finally chose to stay at a low-cost carrier flying shorter routes in a not-so-wide-winged bird, after realizing, following years of late-night deliberations that silently consumed the only stretch of life where chasing that dream would have been still logistically viable, that the extra hours, the distance from his children, the chronic strain on his marriage, and the stoic effort of keeping at it would now cost far more than he could ever rationally justify to his wife, his family, or even himself) will double-check everything and proceed if and only if, after applying the same meticulous reasoning with which he one day decided to abandon the hunt for that damned childhood dream, he considers the situation completely and unequivocally safe.
It strikes me that when people speak of aerophobia, the fear of flying, they mean exactly this: the three-dimensional notion that anything could go wrong, the idea that this backdrop of blind assumptions and little bullshit stories we self-administer to shore up our daily routine could suddenly collapse. That what we had been told over and over again, and which no statistical data allowed us to question, was supposed to be a “smooth” and “safe” (sic) flight becomes the nightmare of a sardine can plummeting, depressurizing in the middle of the dark and cold night, the wind and the rain; the transformation of the “apparatus” (sic) into a fireball swallowing with its flames any vestige of life inside the fuselage. I don’t know if you knew this, but the common postmortem injury for almost all victims of an aviation catastrophe involving a vertical impact is fractured tibias, caused by the reflex action of bracing one’s feet against the cabin floor—a detail that has always appeared to me me as terrifyingly cruel.
This is, at least, the thought distracting me from the nearly three-hour delay that keeps me here, sheltered from the wind and rain that have been soaking England for days, right in the middle of this humble and by now entirely familiar departures terminal.
I must say, though the detail is likely entirely insignificant, that the widespread aversion toward Luton Airport is unfounded and, I dare say, altogether unfair. It is true that Gatwick is the best airport the English capital has (infinitely better than Heathrow, by the way: the airport of royalty is gray, dirty, overly crowded, and the staff working there tend to be cold and rude, which, come to think of it, is always a fine welcome when you’ve been away from the city for a while), but I have always found a certain comfort in the simplicity of this one; it has a domestic air that, on days like today (where, despite being empty and dressed in night, many of us have gathered to share our fears and sorrows at the only open bistro), days when flights are delayed by adverse weather and the few affected passengers arrived when the air was frantic and had to dodge time and again people in a rush crossing the airport, compensates for any headache by letting you see how everything, except the nerves, settles down, and peace accommodates itself in a finite lapse that will last until roughly five in the morning (when, I hope, my flight will have already departed).
It is as easy to think about it, about the contingency inherent to flying, as it is to ignore it, I suppose. You can think about it, for example, if at any point after stepping into the zone controlled by airport security and military police you choose to notice, amidst all the frenzy, how claustrophobically surveilled everything is, how gothically meticulous the administrative control is from the very first embryonic neurochemical impulse that drives you to conceive or, at the very least, undertake your journey. Naturally, if things are this way, it must be because it (the flight, I mean) is an extraordinary circumstance and that, despite everything proclaimed by advertising brochures [and especially the “safety on board” (sic)pamphlet], the act of suspending a sixty-ton metal cylinder in the void cannot in any way be taken for granted or considered—not even within the tempestuous framework of modern technological advances—as “normal.”
Conversely, you can also ignore it and focus your neuroticized attention on how annoying and loud some people are when they travel, especially the British lady sitting next to you who, with her inaudible shouting, is blocking the only resource you have to calm your anxiety (which is to say, thinking), her face absurdly warped by aesthetic surgeries that were clearly cheap and botched (the kind of touch-up that inexplicably enjoys resounding success among lower-middle-class women in the UK, and through which you can, not so inexplicably, identify the kind of passenger—though especially with the feminine suffix, (sic)—that you pray with all your might will not occupy, on this regional flight where you’ve been randomly assigned the middle seat because you didn’t want to pay the eight-euro supplement of the airline’s fare extortion, seats 18D or 18F).
Few people know that all this airport paraphernalia, so homogeneous and cloned worldwide, owes its origin to a very specific historical fluke in American aviation: the first skyjacking in the United States, on May 1, 1961, perpetrated by Antulio Ramírez Ortiz, a Korean War veteran. In an admirable demonstration of defiance and impulsivity (two qualities that, when coinciding in a single person, can achieve notable historical relevance), Ramírez boarded a National Airlines Convair 440 with a kitchen knife and a revolver, forcing the crew to alter their planned course toward Castro’s Havana and the passengers to participate involuntarily in an episode that collective memory has preferred to remember not as a more or less accidental visit to a socialist paradise, nor even as one of the most extraordinary exercises in individual recklessness in history, but as the foundational precedent of air piracy.
This episode, apparently isolated which, I insist, could alternatively be explained as one of the most spectacular demonstrations of individual willpower, if history occasionally handed out medals to the wrong people and which forces us to wonder if the progressive retirement of the Convair 440 from the operational inventories of major flag carriers in the late sixties was actually a response to a logistical necessity stemming from the future implementation of reinforced bulkheads and physically unassailable cockpits (an infrastructure that very event made inevitable, looking back) or if it was all simply an aseptic matter of “technical safety” (sic), operational efficiency, and the natural replacement of a platform doomed by the arrival of jetliners triggered a legislative chain reaction that would culminate in the amendment of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958 to specifically classify air piracy as a federal crime in the United States.
The reform, however, proved entirely insufficient, especially considering the hyperbolic explosion of skyjackings that would characterize the second half of the sixties and which perhaps, as I said, bears some relation to the gradual disappearance of gems like the C440, manufactured by Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation between 1947 and 1954 to be the definitive successor to the then-venerable Douglas DC-3, which, thanks to a low-wing configuration, two Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp radial engines, and a cabin pressurization system that was still rudimentary but revolutionary for its time, turned commercial flight into a surprisingly comfortable experience for a middle class that until then considered it completely normal to reach port with a headache and absolutely shattered eardrums; “apparatuses” (sic), in short, of which numerous civil variants were built (including the Metropolitan chosen by Ramírez Ortiz to carry out his feat) and of which operational examples can still be found taking to the skies, to which the Nixon administration reacted by launching an emergency program in 1970 that introduced screening via military-surplus metal detectors, mandatory physical searches of hand luggage, and the use of secret behavioral profiling to identify potential “threats” (sic), thus permanently and systemically laying the foundations of this ecosystem of ritualized and invasive surveillance that today any citizen accepts as an existential and inescapable toll before boarding a plane.
Even more curious is the fact that the real catalyst for all of this was not 9/11, as is often said presumably to try to reinforce the feeling of collective trauma; “Never forget” (sic), but late-stage neoliberalism, with its invisible, efficient, and voracious logic—the true blind engine of this ritual metamorphosis where we are all suspect extras.
Looked at closely, the events of 2001 were a heavy blow to the assumption of civil security, especially for a state as militarized and enchanted with security as the United States, but they invented nothing new under American law itself. And this holds true despite the fact that they unfortunately left far more fatalities than anyone would wish, and not so much for airports or aviation in general as is often usually said, presumably to shield the narrative of collective trauma manifested by slogans like the omnipresent and outdated “Never Forget” (sic).
What it did do, in any case, was fully open the valves of an immense and latent infrastructure of social and technological control that had been brewing for decades in the offices of Washington. A machinery that finds its most ironic contradiction precisely in how the neoliberal economic model and the entire cultural industry have been able to phagocytize a historical emergency measure to turn it into a permanent bureaucracy—privatized and highly profitable for security corporations, despite having proven profoundly ineffective in real terms or, at least, in terms regarding its primary objective, that is, the “war on terror” (sic).
This is why it is difficult to ignore that this whole air security madness, which forces us to strip ourselves of our civil dignity into gray plastic bins before officials who look straight out of a gray and Kafkaesque dystopia, and who force us to pass our film rolls waiting to be developed through an X-ray scanner that in most cases irreversibly warps them, does not operate (only) to eradicate danger—which is always, by definition, impossible in a world as populated and chaotic as ours—but to subject us to a sort of civil liturgy of passive obedience.
I wouldn’t want to suggest that this microtopical logistical incident was all that drove me to type all this out, but I find myself unable to discount that this diatribe of mine against the procedural dictatorship of the TSA was partially instigated by the empirical fact that, counting today’s, that makes three film rolls that radiation and the mechanical roller have destroyed going back and forth to London; three rolls (one Kodak Gold and two Portra 400), in short, ruined due to the completely arbitrary and dismissive refusal of agents who declined to apply the regulatory protocol for a manual inspection or hand-check (sic)—a conduct that only bureaucratic sadism and the meanest abuse of power can truly justify.
A liturgy where we buy, in the same way we buy all the other axiomatic assumptions and little bullshit stories of our routine such as that the synaptic coordination between ground crew, the two pilots, air traffic controllers, navigation systems, and, of course, the Boeing engineers themselves, whom I forgot to mention earlier, will be mathematically perfect, an anesthetic illusion of “protection” and “safety” (sic) in exchange for relinquishing, with a resigned smile, fundamental rights that in any other sphere we would believe to be inalienable.
All of this to feed a public-private fear industry of gigantic proportions that needs to justify its own economic survival by perpetuating the state of alarm, operating through behavioral profiling algorithms sold as objective science but which are merely imposed biases designed to asymmetrically criminalize certain bodies, culminating in the absurd paradox by which, in the name of the prized freedom of movement that global capitalism itself imperatively needs in order not to collapse, we have ended up accepting the institutionalization of suspicion as the only possible atmosphere to breathe before flying.
I won’t deny that this entire string of eccentricities or tantrums, if you like, could remain simply that; what I am trying to say is that all these things are more connected than it seems. That both realities—aerophobia (understood as the awakening to the fact that there is a socially accepted dimension of reality at least an aeronautical one that can collapse, and indeed does collapse from time to time) and the isolated act conveniently relegated to an anecdote of willpower and impulsivity by veteran Ramírez in ‘61 (which is, it shouldn’t be forgotten, the condition of possibility for this hyper-vigilance at the hands of the TSA)—bring us face to face with the same void: it is in this impulse of lucidity, which a thousand random circumstances may or may not lay bare, where one can catch a glimpse, in a sort of moment of intellectual micro-sedition that will lead us nowhere and won’t last long, of just how absolutely unprotected we are against the world, despite infinite slogans of “safety” and “comfort” (sic).
Because, look: if, God forbid, the plane sitting idle here decides to become, due to fortuitous and statistically highly improbable circumstances, a sardine can plummeting in the middle of the darkness, the wind, and the rain; if it ends up transformed into a depressurized fireball despite the evolution of “apparatuses” (sic) compared to the rudimentary systems that planes like the Convair 440 already had built-in that swallows with its flames any trace of life inside the fuselage and illuminates, if only briefly, this murky night steeped in the most candid overconfidence, I truly promise you that every single passenger on board will have at least one fractured tibia (though it will be a fact logistically difficult to verify for forensic reasons). Whatever our risk profile determined by the algorithm, or whatever our behavior may have been under the panoptic gaze of the TSA regardless of whether or not we decided to directly confront the clumsily operated British lady in the next seat, everyone, without exception, will have no choice but to realize it. It is democratic.
Surely we’ll laugh and have to joke about it because, of course, the whole thing is too sad to speak of properly. But right in the middle of the immense terminal fireball, of this macroscopic tragedy potentially unfolding under the indifferent gaze of a Higher Power and a certain Antulio Ramírez (seated, naturally, on the theologically correct flank of the Father), someone, against all odds, will still crack a final smile. The reason is that, despite the TSA and the lady visibly strained by botched plastic surgery; despite the wind, the storm, and the fare micro-extortion policies of continental low-cost (sic) airlines, the subject confined to anatomical hell between seats 18D and 18F will have managed to bypass a tiny fraction of the corporation’s abstract and arbitrary rules by smuggling in, alongside the mandatory piece of luggage and the “personal item” which by law must fit under the seat in front until it completely wipes out any space for your own ankles, a crumpled Duty Free bag.
A bag that, though it will never reach the hands of the person who should have received it, the subject will know posed absolutely no danger to safety; they will know that, whatever happens, nothing that could go wrong will, in any case, be their fault. And it is true that this makes it neither less tragic nor less terrifying to think about death; to think standing before the fuselage and the wings, which, despite flying, defy any intuitive logic of gravity, sheltered by the industrial echo of the jet engine and the inaudible announcements of the PA system about the material, hyper-concrete, and ridiculous possibility of dying, with a crumpled bag stuffed between their legs, imagining them, for a fleeting instant, entirely fractured due to a mechanical cataclysm completely alien to the TSA, to airport bureaucracy, and to any naive notion of safety to which the subject tried to desperately and unconsciously cling before finding themselves right here, exposed to whatever danger might be waiting for them on the other side of these gates. Aerophobia.