Editor’s Corner
May 1, 2009
Miracle Landings
By
Constance Hale
News stories that feature crippled planes, heroic crews, and crash landings are narratives without even trying to be. They give us a drama in several acts, life-and-death choices, strong protagonists, and spontaneous eloquence. Homer could hardly ask for more.
Lane DeGregory’s terse piece in the St. Petersburg Times pushed us to nose around a bit in the genre. The most narrative of the breaking-news stories we found about U.S. Airways 1549, featured here as Another Great Read, ran in the New York Daily News. A trio of reporters interviewed 15 survivors and witnesses to tell a straightforward chronology that starts with “a shuddering bang and blue flames shooting from the engine” and ends with a 31-year-old salesman praising the pilot: “Because of him my little girl still has a father and my wife still has a husband.”
In a separate profile of Captain Chesley Sullenburger, the Daily News quoted a police source (“that pilot is a stud”), then offered this character sketch: “Sullenberger, 57, looks more like Clark Kent than Superman: He’s balding, slightly built, with a thin mustache. But he emerged from the slowly sinking fuselage of Flight 1549 as one of Gotham’s brightest heroes, able to land engineless airplanes in a single try.” (The profile as a narrative form requires more time and thought than most deadlines allow; this one landed a bit less gracefully than did Sully’s plane.)
Scouting for other examples, we remembered stories from two earlier plane crashes. The first ran in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on April 30, 1988, after an explosive decompression on Aloha Airlines flight 243 tore off a chunk of the jet’s fuselage, blowing a flight attendant out the roof. She was the only fatality; the Honolulu-bound plane landed safely on Maui. Reporter Tim Ryan started his narrative this way:
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Lawrence “Red” Carland lost his shirt.
John Kaniaupio lost his shoe.
Emiko Sugino lost her pierced earrings and a trip to Paris.
And Gary Nekota lost his memory.
But they didn’t lose their lives, thanks to a grace-under-pressure pilot who guided a shattered and bouncing Boeing 737 Aloha Airlines jet safely to Kahului Airport Thursday afternoon after nearly 20 percent of its upper fuselage ripped away.
“‘Holy shit,’ I’m sorry lord, but that’s what I said … when I looked up and saw, I couldn’t believe it, blue sky where the roof of the aircraft should have been,” said Carland, 61, of the Big Island, who was sitting in the dismantled forward cabin.
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The second memorable story ran in the Los Angeles Times on July 20, 1989, after Captain Alfred Haynes and a deadheading DC-10 flight instructor landed a jet that had suffered complete hydraulic failure outside Sioux City, Iowa. J. Michael Kennedy and Bob Baker penned this unforgettable lede: “A crippled United Airlines DC 20 crashed a half-mile short of a runway while trying to make an emergency landing Wednesday afternoon, bursting into a cartwheeling fireball that broke into what one eyewitness described as ‘15,000 pieces.’”
Who, what, when, where, why, a startling metaphor, and a quote that gave us an image—all in one paragraph!
The Sioux City story yielded not just cinematic journalism, but real cinema: Fearless, a movie starring Rosie Perez and Jeff Bridges, took the true story and made it fictional. Likewise, the Aloha Airlines crash inspired the made-for-TV movie Miracle Landing, which won an Emmy Award. Surely, now that the journalists have finished with the story of U.S. Airways Flight 1549, the novelists and filmmakers will continue to spin new narratives.