unsurvivable

on challenges, deviances, and learning to fly

I like to keep my bucket list short. Partly because the things I yearn for largely concern modest and everyday pleasures, partly because I’m someone who is intrigued by much, but captivated by little. One of the few things on my list is to see the space shuttle Discovery, which is currently sitting in a Smithsonian facility near Washington, D.C. I want to know the machine. I want to stand in its presence and feel the weight of the thing, and the way it bridges the space between what we imagine and what we can see.

The shuttle program was a fascinating and sort of quintessentially human endeavour, and not always in a good way. It was right for it to be discontinued: the shuttles were dangerous, enormously expensive, and somewhat impractical versus the needs of most spaceflight missions. As far as just transporting astronauts to and from orbit, they couldn’t hold a candle to the efficiency and reliability of the little Russian Soyuz, which ain’t much to look at but gets the job done. But my God, the shuttles looked cool. Watch a video of them in orbit, rotating gracefully over the blue sea, a giant’s ballet in zero-G, and tell me they weren’t the most beautiful machines ever made.

The shuttle was, in short, a triumph of aesthetics over safety. Of ambition over utility. Of the belief in what could be, over the facts of what is. The space shuttle captured the best and worst of our inclinations. It was a love letter to a mythological version of humanity that never really existed — which is to say, one that had it all figured out.

I’ve been thinking about that again, having just finished the new Netflix documentary series Challenger: The Final Flight. I don’t think there’s anything new in the series, which isn’t surprising: the unsurvivable 1986 post-launch explosion was long ago dissected along every possible angle. (That said, what’s up with the streaming service trend of producing narratively gripping documentaries that look incredibly sleek, but don’t actually tell us anything we didn’t already know?)

Still, it is a damning refresher on the ways NASA and a contractor failed the seven astronauts of Challenger. It is also a good look at the larger and more widespread problem known as normalization of deviance; or, in other words, the way that even the most risky dysfunctions become tolerated and even accepted, so long as they’re still working well enough to manage. It’s something we see over and over again, in every possible arena of human behaviour. If a problem doesn’t kill us, we learn to live with it.

Yet despite its many and horrifying mistakes, I have to give NASA the tiniest of breaks on Challenger’s legacy (and that of the 2003 Columbia disaster). Before Challenger, as the documentary points out, NASA was trying to sell space flight as being as safe as commercial air travel. That was a ridiculously hubristic statement, but there is something about it that’s worth digging into a little further, in fairness to NASA.

Since the U.S. space program began, 17 astronauts have died in orbital vehicles: the seven on Challenger, the seven on Columbia, and the three who died in a rehearsal test accident on the launch pad for Apollo 1. (Incredibly, the U.S. has never lost an astronaut in space, the most inherently deadly place out there. That has to be the greatest testament to engineering of all.)

Meanwhile, commercial air travel isn’t as safe as it is because of any superiority of leadership, design or organization. It’s safe because there’s been a massive amount of it, which gave us opportunities to find every possible way (and counting!) that humans can screw up and machines can fail. Next time you’re on a plane — which, I realize, may be a long time in the current climate — take a look around. Listen to the communications. Look at the fabric on the seats, the shape of the cabin windows.

All of these things bear the mark of disasters, many of them unsurvivable. The ways pilots talk to each other; the ways they talk to air traffic control; the structure of cargo bay doors; the smoke detectors in the bathrooms; the wings, the fuselage, the engines. All of these are the way they are now because many people died to force the lessons.

Almost everything we know about how to fly safely was learned through carnage. Actually, you can say that about a lot of things. Yeah, it’s morbid to think about. But it’s important to remember: we do learn things out of disaster. We do come out of it stronger. After Challenger, the O-rings on the shuttles’ solid rocket boosters never failed again.

— — —

I don’t intend to talk about this much, but I ought to talk about it somewhere, because Talking About It is what people keep saying we need to do. I’ve been gone for awhile: from work, from Twitter, from my own sense of self. At the end of August, my mental health strolled up to a cliff, took a look over the edge and decided to nosedive right off. For awhile I had to pull back from everything public to try and recover altitude.

To be clear, I’m not fully there yet. The parachute has opened. The free fall is over, of that much I’m reasonably certain. Now it’s time to relight these engines. (I realize I’m mangling metaphors here. Not many vehicles have both parachute and engine; but in the interests of mental and emotional wellbeing, let’s damn well make one.)

I don’t really need to give the details of what triggered the collapse. I’m more private about things like that than I used to be, having grown more cautious about how it can be perceived. There is, still, the spectre of stigma, which a reader used to doggedly remind me is an action, not a phenomenon: it isn’t something that just floats out in the world. It’s something that people do. But as long as I can’t stop them from doing it, then I have to set some boundaries on what others are allowed to see.

Nothing changed, really. I’m still the same as I always was. I am still me.

But there was a moment, maybe three weeks ago, where I wasn’t sure the crash would be survivable, where waiting for the fall itself to end seemed almost unbearable, when there seemed no way back up. This is the way you think when you’re in the middle of disaster, when the multitude of decisions and indecisions that brought you to just that moment in time line up to create a hole big enough to fall through.

(And then, a voice in my head whispers: after the Challenger exploded, commander Dick Scobee tried to fly the crew cabin without wings all the way down to the sea. If he can keep fighting to right the ship, so can you.)

Now that I’ve pulled my wings back to level, the errors that led to the crash are coming into better view. The mistakes that are tolerated until they kill us in airplanes or space shuttles can gnaw at our minds too. Maybe there are a lot of things that hurt, but don’t break you. Maybe you’re damaged, but working well enough to get by. Maybe you’ve learned to normalize deviance, knowing that something about your structure is weakened, but being lulled into seeing it as just the regular price of getting through.

Then you try to launch, and suddenly discover you can no longer withstand the forces at work upon you.

That’s where healing has to start, I think, and understanding too. As we go along, maybe we learn to accept and compensate for the ways we are breaking. Maybe we even manage to look fine, on the outside. But we should always dream of more than just getting by; we can love and forgive the damages we find, without coming to believe they are the normal operating procedure for being alive.

Hey, at least I learned something from the latest wreckage. Something I can use to engineer the whole shebang to be stronger. That’s gotta count for something, right?

— — —

In 2014, the pilot and journalist William Langewiesche — a man who is, in my mind, one of the most talented writers of the era, particularly when it comes to drawing links between the technical facts of his beat and wider sociocultural implications — wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about the unsurvivable 2009 crash of Air France 447, which plunged into the Atlantic Ocean en route between Rio de Janeiro and Paris.

As aviation accidents go, the Air France disaster was notable because there was nothing wrong with the aircraft or the environment. Nothing forced the crash. Rather, the crash happened because a minor and transient issue — frozen pitot tubes leading to a loss of airspeed indicators that lasted less than a minute — caused the pilots to take a series of panicked and inappropriate actions that doomed the flight. It took them just a few minutes to fly a perfectly fine Airbus A330, and all 228 people on it, straight into the sea.

The issue, as Langewiesche ably explored, is that the very automation that made air travel extremely safe created a new set of problems: pilots now have less experience actually flying a plane than they used to. Much of their work comes down to monitoring the aircraft’s automation, but those systems have become so complex that few people, including the engineers that design them, can adequately explain how they work. As a result, when the automation fails pilots may not know how to respond appropriately, and may find themselves stressed by confusing information. If the Air France 447 pilots had done nothing when the airspeed indicator went wonky, Langewiesche notes, “they would have done all they needed to do.”

In a way, this is almost the opposite of the normalization of deviance that doomed Challenger and Columbia. This is a disaster caused by technological advances so reliable, they rendered deviance so rare as to be intolerable; the pilots had no idea how to handle it, even when “handling it” meant simply flying the damn plane.

Last night, I re-read Langewiesche’s story in bed. It was a quiet and graceful sort of night. I had a cat on my feet, and some take-out Chinese, and a head full of dreams about a story I’ve been working on for a couple of months that’s soon to see light. Earlier in the evening, my best friend had come over to visit. I’d sunk into reading long, beautiful journalism. I looked for the places that ache, and I found them, but underneath them I saw something else: the realization that I was safe and needed nothing. It was enough, is enough, to simply exist in one moment in time.

And I thought —

There is nothing wrong with the aircraft. All you gotta do, is just fly.