GREY’S NOTES
by Michael Grey.
Piping Today #92 • 2018.
No matter how often I cross the Atlantic, I always pause to marvel at the awesome speediness of aviation. Even without supersonic Concorde engineering, the Atlantic can still be crossed in single-digit hours on a 10-a-penny Airbus or Boeing.
Like near-countless many, my dad and his family, he the youngest of six, came to Canada on a steamship, the Harland & Wolff-built SS Laurentic. The journey from Greenock’s Tail of the Bank to Quebec was eight days. Today, with light headwinds, an aircraft crossing to Canada can fly in just over six hours. There are millions of people alive today over 90 who can remember 1929. Steamship travel that supported the immigration of toddler William is still part of living history. With this context, I always think of the Greys when I fly to Scotland. Today we can travel almost anywhere in less time than it takes to queue for Disney World’s Splash Mountain.
Like a day trip in the car or your Austin Allegro’s 5000-kilometre oil change, air travel has seemingly become routine. Over the last 40 years, global air travel has almost increased eightfold: in 1974, airplanes carried 421million people globally. By 2014, the number had grown by three billion passengers. But what’s ordinary or normal about jamming your backside in a jet-propelled metal tube for hours at a time – and with hundreds of other people, usually strangers? The great film director Orson Welles said: “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” I agree. I’ve known both.
The more you travel – or do anything, for that matter – the greater the chance of gleaning an understanding of what’s possible. Just doing something – anything – will give you knowledge. Knowledge gained through experience can give a person wisdom. If you’re lucky. And the more you travel the greater the chance of hearing a plane’s captain’s crackly intercom request, “…is there a doctor on board … ?” (as I did, again, last week on a flight to Frankfurt). Or, cue Orson’s terror: “… prepare yourself for an emergency landing”.
On September 2, 1998, all 229 passengers and crew onboard Swissair flight 111 were killed in a horrific crash eight kilometres from the shoreline of rural Nova Scotia. Flight 111’s search, crash recovery operation and investigation took more than four years to complete. A truly awful tragedy.
On September 4, 1998, I was onboard an overnight fight from Toronto to Glasgow. A bargain fare helped a four-day weekend trip for a little business and a stop at Rouken Glen and the European Pipe Band Championships. Easy-peasy. The now-defunct Royal Airlines was a charter airline – low-cost fares to the UK were at the core of their business model. So on this flight, the plane was especially full of seniors heading home to the Old Country to visit family and friends on the cheap.
A couple of hours or so after take-off – just east of Newfoundland – it became clear something was just not right. The meal had been served and tray tables were all down, covered with empty cups and plates. The food wasn’t great but that wasn’t the cause of the distinct odour in the air. It was the astringent pong of burning plastic. I turned to my pal Malkie B: “Do you smell something?” He nodded yes with what I recall was as an unnerving degree of seriousness. And then came the smoke alarm. With a foggy haze now visible just below the cabin’s ceiling, any hope that the bells were brought on by some old codger puffing away in the lavatory were out the window. The smell of burning plastic is the last thing anyone wants to be exposed to anywhere – never mind on board an aloft aircraft.
Things happened fast (hello: where there’s smoke there’s fire). The captain of the Boeing 757 announced in a muffled voice – clearly distorted by an oxygen mask – that we had “some problems” and needed to land as soon as possible. We were to “prepare for an emergency landing” at the NATO airbase in Goose Bay, Labrador – 20 torturously-long minutes away.
While some barely-working-age flight attendants scurried up and down the aisles throwing dinner rubbish in green bin liners – all the while with tears streaming down their faces – I thought, “What damned bad luck”. I mean, what were the chances of another awful plane crash – in the very same area – only two days after the Swissair disaster? I was to find out.
I remember still some of the characters on the plane writing last notes to loved ones, holding each other and, well, sobbing. You know there is a happy ending to this story. We landed at 0300 local time in Goose Bay – over 1700 kilometres from Toronto. Big yellow school buses met us – what a happy sight – and transported us to barracks where we would breakfast with members of the German airforce. It surely is a truism that a person’s authentic way comes through when confronted with difficult times. Many passengers railed against the blameless Royal Airlines staff. Those demanding the impossible peppered the mostly stoic and weary newly-shipwrecked.
By midday, all would leave Goose Bay in two groups flying aboard quickly-leased Boeing 727s – an aircraft not designed for long flights. So, with fuelling stops in Keflavik, Iceland, and Manchester, we finally made it to Glasgow. With the Goose Bay event occurring so close to the top-of-news Swissair crash the media throng at Glasgow airport’s arrivals area was remarkable. Camera lights blazed everywhere with the flight’s most discomposed excitedly recounting their stories.
Malkie and I made it to Rouken Glen in time for the last few bands and a beer – or 10. It took me a couple of years to find my air legs again. I have a good idea of the facts when it comes to flying safety. The National Safety Council (US) advises you have a one in 114 chance of dying in a car accident. To exit in a plane crash? One in 9821. Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it another way when he wrote in 2013 that “a traveller could on average fly once a day for four million years before succumbing to a fatal crash.” I think he is saying you might crash – but you won’t die. OK. Flying is safe.
Still, I wonder sometimes what an eight-day ocean crossing might be like – no turbulence, no tray-tables-in-upright positions, no armrest elbow wars. But then, there’s the icebergs. Damned icebergs.
Bon voyage.