Ron McMillan's Blog
Air Travel Joys
Flying in a commercial airliner is assuredly safer than tying your shoelaces on Sauchiehall Street, but the dangers of air travel are not of the sort to which a lot of logic can be applied. Nor are they quite the same the world over.
Yesterday’s disaster in north China puts me in mind of a trip I did around China in the late 1990s, a marathon jaunt on assignment for the Sugar Devil, Inc., that saw me flying nine times on consecutive days, in everything from a 747 so fresh it still smelled of Seattle to a Chinese-made Yak (no, really), that smelled, well, yak-like.
One landing at the singularly hideous city of Wuhan (think of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner minus the appealing bits) surprised me when we put down not at the shiny new regional capital airport, nor even at the second-tier hub, but at a third place that owed more to Korean War bombing missions than to modern commercial jet travel. While we taxied towards what looked like an abandoned farmhouse (and that turned out to be the terminal building – as in terminal decline), children from nearby farms resumed their interrupted game of football. On the runway.
As we were piled onto a regular city bus, a guard in the canvas pumps and ill-fitting polyester uniform suffered by security men all over China stood uneasy, immediately adjacent to one of the 737’s engines.
Even as I watched him, he turned and casually put one palm to the engine housing. He pulled it away (at least, most of it) a lot less casually, head spinning to see if anyone noticed, like an adult scans the neighbours’ windows when he falls off his daughter’s bicycle, less worried about the broken wrist than the possibility that the Jenkins at Number 41 might have spotted his pratfall. The poor guard probably only ever made that mistake once.
The most disquieting episode on that trek unravelled like a dodgy bit of theatre in the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang, the region where yesterday’s disaster took place. It was winter time at a latitude within touching distance of the Siberian source of a wind that cut through apron traffic like a scimitar wielded by Genghis Khan himself. I know, because I was part of that traffic, three times, as we walked hundreds of metres back and forth to the Yak aircraft. It was an ungainly propellor-driven creation that enclosed about forty passengers in perches so cramped that I was glad we only had an hour or so of contortion to endure before (hopefully) landing at our destination of Harbin.
Belted into place, we were tossed the most perfunctory of safety lectures before the flimsy door that separated two pilots from the proletariat was slammed and the engines fired up to a shaky roar. Then they wound down and a female steward with a voice like a chisel caught in a bandsaw spoke in gruff Mandarin. Something to the order of ‘Get off. Wait in the terminal.’ Which we did, marching dejectedly across ice-particle-swept tarmac like a flock of the condemned.
An hour later we marched back, and next to the aircraft a technical crew in mismatched uniforms exchanged loud congratulatory slurs. The guys who just fixed our aircraft were drunk as teenagers at a school dance, but by then I was so cold I didn’t care – I just wanted to get out of the wind and off the ground.
It wasn’t to be that easy. After a replay of the earlier aborted attempt, the exterior door was thrown open and the drunk techs came marching in single file along the narrow aisle, reaching, as one, for their keyrings. Each man picked out the smallest of his keys and proceeded to use it to fiddle clumsily with the screws on a ceiling panel. Our safety specialists didn’t have so much as a screwdriver between them, though one of them did have a heavy rubber torch. Perched on the arms of two seats, he shouted through the open cockpit door to the pilots as he used the torch to hammer spiritedly at clunky bakelite fittings and thick contorted wiring that hinted at a 1950s design recreated forty years later. Each time Mr Torch Hammer called out, the pilots answered in the negative, until at last they yelled frantically at him to stop, and he jumped down and ordered his minions to do the trick with the keys and replace our ceiling. A couple of minutes later, they were gone, and we were rolling.
It didn’t take an aeronautical engineer to work out what I had witnessed. The man with the torch had done just enough random battering among fragile electronic components to make a warning light on the cockpit dashboard disengage. It was a most Asian solution. No warning light – nothing to stop us going, now. The technical crew left behind a lingering whiff of cheap alcohol and what I imagined must be the overpowering stench of my fear.
Like the Stieg Larsson books that tell you whodunnit with 150 pages still to go, you’ll know by now that I survived the flight, but there was one more slow-motion terror sequence to play out before we even reached cruising altitude. Shortly after take-off, while the Yak strained to climb at a precipitous angle, clear liquid streamed from the same ceiling section that had been at the centre of the earlier technical crimes. So steep was our rate of climb that the fluid splattered on the head of a man sitting about three rows behind the source; he panicked, unclipped his seatbelt, stepped into an aisle that was at least forty-five degrees from horizontal and, promptly embraced by the same G-forces that welded us to our seat backs, set off in a series of ungainly somersaults that only ended when he crashed into the catering boxes at the rear of the cabin.
When at last we levelled off, he was eventually shown back to his place. By now he looked a bit like that guy who fell off his daughter’s bike. The stewardess very casually wiped down his seat – and never did tell the pilot about an unidentified noxious fluid streaming from the aircraft ceiling.