The exit row
I cannot remember the last time I have felt out of control. Everything in my life is, for better or worse, the result of my actions or at the very least, I could easily take action to get out of the situation. Quite an amazing accomplishment for society. In fact if society could hope to do anything for us, extending free will to the furthest reaches is pretty damned good.
But then I got on an airplane back to London. I do this somewhat frequently, enough to earn myself the reward of an exit row seat from my favored airline. So I got in my exit row seat and was informed that in the case of some strange accident that I was to yank the door away and get the hell out. I stretched out, slept, and was awakened as we descended in to London several hours later. The entire plane was vibrating with the pliant ceiling warping and whining as we shook in serious turbulence. We were in thick clouds and remained there for some time, pitching in a way that your body is only lightly conscious of. Finally we broke through the clouds and were about 1000 feet above south London according to the displays they have thoughtfully installed in the cabins intent on keeping you either entertained or well-informed of the meaningless statistics of the flight. Instantly the wings began see-sawing up and down, but how much I could not gauge as I only had a tiny porthole view to the outside. We continued descending in fits, the plane would drop out from underneath and then rush back up to meet again. The little green fields went up and down but out of sync, so I had very little clue of what was really going on.
At about 75 feet of the runway, my wing whipped down, having a seat directly over it I call it mine, suddenly pointing at the taxiway directly adjacent to the runway (which I had no idea we were now over). My mental model of a landing airplane suggests that this is about 30 degrees or more of roll, far, far more than a pilot would have ever wanted. Much lower and the wing could have certainly touched the ground. The pilot reacted quickly and suddenly we rocketed up back up, engines at full power. He came back on the intercom and told us that there was rather strong gusting wind (obviously) and while we may not experience this every time, this was in fact a regular occurrence and something he was entirely comfortable handling.
I hate it when they say things like that.
It was at this point that I started to mentally review how I would, in possibly the only way the exit row would ever ever be useful as an exit, shuttle everyone off the plane. If the plane were to crash on the sea, it would shatter in to bits. If the plane were to lose its two engines, it would fall out of the sky and shatter to bits. If there were a crazy terrorist on board, it would shatter to bits. Basically the exit rows are like rowboats on the Titanic: placebos to make you feel better about things that are extremely unlikely but extremely deadly. One of the few ways I could think of would be a failed, skidding landing, where the plane is going sufficiently slow enough to perhaps break its landing gear and rip the undercarriage but remain in mostly one piece. Of course, I was on an over-wing exit, and everyone knows that wings carry the fuel. So it would be extremely important to get the hell out of the plane before it did in fact explode. So I would selflessly open the exit, leap out of it, and make room for other, less favored airline customers who were not seated in the exit row and were thus more likely to be nearer to the vessel when it exploded.
Obviously it’s worth more than an extra bag of peanuts to establish a solid relationship with your airline. It could mean your life.
While I considered my brief bulkhead tossing heroics, the pilots busted a U and tried again to land. This time the plane was quiet. The plane approached the runway, again nearer to the middle than the ends of it. This time the entire plane was lifted for a moment and the dropped down many feet. This same feeling happened all the way down but when you are near to the ground, you realize that you are making an instant descent of about 25 to 30 feet. As soon as this downward gust of wind shoved us nearer to the runway, the pilot again aborted and climbed out. This time he did not say a word.
Again we banked and tried again. This time my hands were holding on to the armrests to hold my seat firmly in place (which had a lifevest under it) and I watched aggressively as the information screens showed flight data in combinations of English and French, Metric and Imperial (why in the hell would the French care how many feet and miles we were from landing???). The plane again fluttered around the vicinity of the runway, this time the pilot aborted without an obvious reason, I suspect he felt the same bad mojo we all felt.
This cabin was filled with people. There were babies. Dogs. Flight attendants. And not a single one of them had made a sound. The pilot came on the intercom and said “they were going to make a plan”. At this point, I realized that no one in the cabin had any control what so ever. There was a lot of wind, a little pilot, and a bunch of us. We were all along for the ride. The pilots had a good deal of control over the situation. I suppose we could have just flown around for a while. Or gone to another airport. Or parachuted out. But everyone else on the plane was transported from modern luxury to hard reality: we were cheating death going way beyond the human splat limit in a ridiculous metal bird that ate kerosene and shat airspeed. We were being whipped around by winds which considered our plane an impediment and couldn’t even discern our existence inside the cigar tube. Until we got enough plane parts on the ground to either taxi to a jetway or for me to fling the door out and slide off the wing, I was not going anywhere. I suspect we were all thinking the same thing.
Again we lept up to 3000 feet and were now on a glide path back down to Earth. I remembered that after gently placing the bulkhead on my seat (it opens inward due to the lower pressure on the outside), I was to pull a little cord in the door jab. I thought about the purpose of placing a tiny cord inside a huge door. I figured I would not, in fact, pull the cord, and see if it was this which caused the rubber slip-n-slides to deploy. I also wondered briefly if there were elevators down to the cargo hold like there were in Snakes on a Plane. I thought this would be a good place to make out. I also considered that searching for things like “767 blueprints” would likely lead to being on a terrorist watchlist. Meanwhile we were now at that magic 50 foot level, the one at which our wings might “catch” on the ground, should another gust come from the Canaries.
This time it was smoother, until just above the ground. We were flying at what seemed to be stall speed, and the plane suddenly dropped down to the runway on all wheels. The moment this happened, half of the cabin applauded as if it were the end of a performance. The other half began coughing, vomiting, and crying. Ever considerate, the stewardesses came round with extra barf bags and moist towelettes. I hadn’t actually seen or used a barf bag since I was young enough to enjoy considering the prospect of seeing my food again, but I now thought of the bag the same as the barf, and with minimal touching stuffed the bag out of sight. I looked over at the flight attendants (who are, in 767s, stuffed helplessly in front of lavatory doors and immediately in line with exit rows). One of them looked positively green, which I found rather consoling. Cool and worldly as I am, I was not overreacting. This poor girl was going to lose her breakfast while I had only come to grips with the idea that there were occasions where I relinquished control of my life. While those situations were rare, they were to be appreciated for what they were, not a short increase in my likelihood of death but an experience in and of themselves which would leave me aware of just how responsible I was for my existence.
Interestingly this is one of the complaints of modernism and one of the common themes of postmodernism: that we are controlled by society into a very structured life devoid of free will. To my thinking, we’ve eliminated most of the biggest and baddest of nature and human life, and what’s left is the soft, pudgy middle. A life where you are unlikely to die from preventable disease, crime, war, famine. But you are certainly allowed to starve yourself, beat yourself, and make yourself sick. Postmodernists would consider such action “commentary”; everyone else finds it stupid. But going in to a self-medicated coma to prove that you can still “feel” is a far cry from placing yourself in a relatively normal jet and getting tossed around very near to the ground. Pain that you’ve opted in to (hangovers, bad relationships, extreme sports, etc) is nothing like real “life flashed before my eyes” out of control fear. And while I wouldn’t prescribe it, and indeed you literally cannot opt in to it, everyone needs a little reminder of who’s in charge once in a while.
