How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [87]
Happily, I didn’t think about that because the other thing you might not have considered is the cooling system on a 1950s ex-Angolan air force aeroplane. What you get above each seat is a small Pifco fan, and because I was upside down, hanging by my seatbelt, the top of my head was actually in the blades. It was very uncomfy, having a haircut while the wrong way up, in a tropical thunderstorm and knowing that, if the pilot regained control, I’d be getting a brown shower.
I turned at one point to a colleague who was sitting in the next seat, having a lovely Oh Brother Nimmo monk cut, and asked, because he had a pilot’s licence, if we were in trouble. The white knuckled ‘yes’ was enough.
How did it feel? Pretty awful, if I’m honest. Because I didn’t know whether the impact was one minute or one second away, it was impossible to brace or get my breathing right. It’s like knowing you’re going to be punched but not when.
I do remember thinking, though, that it would be quite a cool way to go. Better, I thought, to scream through the pearly gates in a Russian plane over Cuba than with a tube up my nose and a grey face.
And then, obviously, the story has a boring ending because the pilot did regain control and we did land safely and I wasn’t killed. Or covered in shit.
Which brings me back to those poor souls on board the Air France jet that didn’t land safely. Last week, experts managed to work out that it did not break up in mid-air, which would have killed everyone instantly – one minute you’d have been snuggling into Russell Crowe with a glass of red and the next, you’d have been dead. Instead, it remained intact until it hit the sea. Which meant that those passengers had to sit there, for several minutes, knowing they were on a high-speed one-way ticket into oblivion. And what makes it even more poignant for me than that is that one of them was a friend of mine.
I imagine that being told by a doctor you have three months to live is scary. I imagine, too, that being burnt at the stake is bad. Or beheaded on the internet. But surely, the worst is being on a plane, over the middle of an ocean, pointing downwards and doing about 750 mph.
I know that I lived and I know that last week a twelve-year-old girl escaped almost unharmed from another Airbus tragedy in the Indian Ocean. But really, when a plane falls out of the sky, your chances are not even slim. And worst of all, you are jammed in a seat, unable to do a damn thing about it. With cancer, you think that if you only eat nuts and read the Bible a lot, you might pull through. In a car, you can take avoiding action as the lamppost looms. But in a plane, you are impotent.
And that’s what brings me on to this morning’s bright idea. At present, all passengers are given a life jacket even though they know they may as well have been given a piece of birthday cake or a pack of playing cards. I think I’m right in saying that in all of civil aviation history, not one life has ever been saved by the whistle, the torch or the toggles.
So why not give everyone a parachute instead? Of course, most passengers would be too paralysed with fear in a real emergency to put it on properly. Even if they had been listening to the safety briefing. But here’s the thing. As the plane screamed downwards, you would at least have something to do. Finding it, reading the instructions, making your way to the door, working out how it can be turned to manual and so on. This would give people hope. Which is so much better than the horrific alternative: despair.
Sunday 5 July 2009
Just one word and my T-shirt offends the whole of Japan
There comes a point in a man’s life when he is no longer able to wear a T-shirt. You have only to see an overweight American tourist wobbling around looking like Winnie-the-Pooh to know that I’m right; to know that T-shirts are fine for schoolboys on sports day. But not fine thereafter. As soon as the merest hint of a belly begins