Indie-darling Andrew Bird once explained in an old NPR interview that his 2007 track “Fiery Crash” is based upon this little superstition he has whenever he’s at the airport, that if he envisions his plane going down in flames, then it won’t crash. Like a kid thinking that if he just predicts every day is when the world ends then it won’t ever end “because ye know not the day nor the hour,” Bird predicts every single flight he boards will crash as a sort of reverse-good-luck charm. He acknowledges how silly this ritual is (“it’s just a formality” he sings in the finale), but still he engages in it every time he boards his flight. If nothing else, I suspect it helps him to never take his flight for granted–just as we should never take the miracle of our lives for granted.
My wife is a flight attendant, as I’ve mentioned before. And though (to quote Superman) statistically speaking, flying remains the safest way to fly, nevertheless the recent purges of the FAA by the current incompetent administration at the start of the year–and the very predictable high-profile plane crashes that immediately followed in their wake–have admittedly made me just a touch more skittish every time she reports to work nowadays. So in my own private variation of Andrew Bird’s “Fiery Crash,” I have found myself increasingly rewatching the two following YouTube clips of famous cinematic plane crashes. I suppose it’s like spitting on the ones you love, as a way to ward off the evil eye.
The first is from the 2016 film Sully, director Clint Eastwood’s dramatic reenactment of the real-life “Miracle on the Hudson” in 2009.
By way of comparison: Some folks have argued that the true appeal of Star Trek isn’t in its high-concept Sci-Fi or in the sheer romance of exploring the stars, but in its “Competence Porn”, the fantasy of a workplace where everyone puts aside their personal differences, is good at their jobs, have short two-minute meetings, respect each other’s input, and work together seamlessly to accomplish a seemingly impossible task–something we all so rarely get to experience in real life.
That same “Competence Porn” is on display here in this plane crash scene, and accounts for the film’s continued popularity. Although the narrative focus is largely on the titular Captain Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger (ably portrayed by Tom Hanks in one of his many never-take-a-trip-with-Tom-Hanks features) and his incredible grace-under-pressure, absolutely everyone else in this scene–his co-pilot (played by Mormonism’s own Aaron Eckhart), the flight attendants, air-traffic control, the passengers themselves, the ferry-boat captains that immediately dispatch to rescue them–all display top-level competence from beginning to end as well.
For example, neither Sully nor his co-pilot panic when they hit the flock of bird during a routine take-off from LaGuardia in New York, and both their engines short out; instead, they calmly yet quickly go through their checklist of options to get the engines restarted. When it swiftly becomes clear that both engines are dead, they immediately call in “MayDay” and continue to quickly problem-solve with air traffic control, who also do not panic (though it becomes a running joke of sorts that every single person the controller talks to has to confirm, “Which engine?” “Both engines.”); with adept professionalism, they quickly clear runways for Sully at LaGuardia, Newark, and even Titerboro, New Jersey. The actors do an excellent job of communicating deep worry in their eyes, even as their voices and body-language remain calm and professional at all times.
When the gliding plane finally falls below radar, the air traffic controller allows himself a single “Sh*t,” but then doesn’t waste one more second; he immediately stands up and gets on the radio and broadcasts to any and all aircraft in the area to spot the plane for them. A helicopter pilot who was in the middle of giving an air tour of Manhattan responds; he immediately cuts short his spiel mid-sentence and starts giving a play-by-play to air traffic control. “It’s going down! It’s gonna hit the water!” the helicopter pilot shouts, but it’s the loudest anyone speaks in this entire scene.
When Captain Sully finally determines that they don’t have enough thrust to even fly to New Jersey and so makes the executive decision to land the plane in the Hudson, he announces simply to the cabin, “Brace for impact.” A lesser Hollywood film would’ve featured mass-pandemonium from the panicking passengers, but Clint Eastwood wisely makes the choice to portray what actually happens, and shows the flight attendants (and this is the part that always gets me, for obvious reasons), who only a minute earlier were calmly reassuring the cabin and recommending everyone just keep their seat-belts on, immediately strap themselves in and start shouting in unison, “Brace! Brace! Brace! Heads down, stay down.” (I have heard my wife practice these lines many a time, everytime she prepares for her annual recertification.) The passengers, to their immense credit, listen.
Not that everyone there isn’t absolutely terrified. It’s the understated little details that really sell the scene: the passenger who quickly closes the window before putting his head down; the man whipping out his phone to text his loved ones; the middle-aged woman and her elderly-mother telling each other how much they love each other; the father offering his wife to hold their newborn child; the foreign tourist pulling out her crucifix and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. But more importantly, none of the passengers panic, either! Partly that’s because they don’t have time to; but it’s also because they are all rising to the occasion. (I really wish this had been our mass-response during the pandemic.)
And when the plane does crash safely in the water and Captain Sully tells everyone simply, “Evacuate,” they all do so without further argument. The flight attendants–who also had absolutely terrified looks in their eyes when they hit the water–rise to the occasion as well, and immediately start barking orders directing people to the exits. The passengers are scared, but there is no stampede, and no one is flummoxed by how to open the emergency-doors. When a well-dressed business-traveler hesitates before jumping into the freezing cold river (he’s not on the exit by the wings), a lesser film would have made him throw a hissy-fit about ruining his clothes or getting his expensive watch wet or whatever; instead, when the flight-attendant orders him to “evacuate the plane,” he just jumps and goes for it, quickly resurfacing and swimming towards the wings. He doesn’t even have time to get hypothermia, because the ferries are already showing up and throwing out life-jackets. When a passenger says, “I thought I was going to die,” a ferryman deadpans in his New York accent, “Nobody dies today.”
That first half of the film is just such a moving piece of “competence porn,” that it’s a shame that the rest of the film has to happen. Because of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, you can’t just have a film about a plane that lands safely, but must insert some manufactured drama to pad out the runtime. So the remainder of the film becomes focused on the official NTSB investigation into the crash, portraying the investigators as over-zealous, antagonistic witch-hunters out on a vendetta to pin the crash on Sully himself, and how he has to clear his good name in court. This was the definite moment when Clint Eastwood veered sharply from reality, since all parties involved–including the real-life Captain Sullenberger himself–have all repeatedly affirmed that the investigation was entirely cordial, a mere formality, that everyone in the NTSB was as anxious to just get it over with and clear his good name as anyone. The film version was a completely contrived conflict, and the final act mars my enjoyment of the film as a whole.
But part of me wants to be charitable towards Clint Eastwood, because how on earth do you wring drama out of a plane crash where everyone survives? I don’t like how he besmirches the NTSB, but I’m not sure what conflict he could’ve come up with instead to give the rest of the film emotional stakes.
Ironically, the 2012 Robert Zemeckis film Flight might actually do a better job at this, by fictionalizing the miraculous plane crash entirely.
In this movie, Denzel Washington portrays the hero-pilot as a much more morally-complex figure than Sully: he’s a coke-addict, a functioning alcoholic, and an adulterer. When this scene opens, he is fast asleep, hungover in the captain’s chair, as his visibly-annoyed co-pilot prepares the plane for their initial descent into Atlanta–when suddenly the plane suffers a freak mechanical failure.
Now, this movie’s crash-landing is based on the real-life Alaska Airlines 261 disaster of 2000, which also involved a freak mechanical failure sending a passenger plane into a tailspin. The black-box recordings of that crash still apparently get taught in flight-schools today, because the pilots, even when they were in a catastrophic nose-dive, “never stopped flying the plane.” These real-life pilots apparently did absolutely everything they could to correct the plane’s trajectory right till the bitter end. The plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean, and there were no survivors. But since this film is fictional, they get to have their cake and eat it too: Zemeckis gets to dramatize a real-life plane crash, but at least have the majority of the crew and passengers walk away alive.
Flight is not quite the same example of “competence porn” as Sully: the co-pilot definitely panics once the nose-dive begins (though he still acquits himself well in helping stabilize the aircraft), which snaps Denzel Washington’s character awake. He immediately takes control of the aircraft and, despite still being in the fog of a hangover, acts with the utmost professionalism as he immediately starts barking orders and doing absolutely everything in his power to correct the dive. Denzel’s character is overall cool and competent, but we definitely see the passengers panicking in the galley, and at least a couple of the flight attendants make some incredibly stupid choices (e.g. unbuckling and going down the galley during an uncontrolled dive).
Nevertheless, as in Sully, this isn’t just the Denzel Washington show here; again, the air traffic controller is on the radio problem-solving this emergency with him every step of the way (they reportedly used a real-life air traffic controller initially hired as a consultant to do the voice), and the lead flight-attendant assists him with the throttle as he prepares to do a barrel-roll to try and level the plane out. (The moment that always gets me in this scene is when Denzel asks her quickly, “Margaret, what’s your son’s name?” “What’s my son’s name?!” “The black box, tell him you love him,” he says. He’s not giving up, but he’s being realistic about their chances.)
Despite being hungover in an absolute worst-case scenario, Denzel Washington’s character does finally stabilize the plane into a glide; but with both engines out, he doesn’t have enough thrust to make it to the airport, so makes the executive decision to crash-land in a nearby farm field. He is concussed on impact. When he comes to, the POV shifts to his eyes, as EMTs drag him from the cockpit, and he catches glimpses of the lead flight-attendant crying traumatically over the body of her dead colleague, passengers stumbling onto the field as emergency workers sprint around them, and black plumes of smoke billowing out of the burning plane.
There is also an NTSB investigation in this film, but in an interesting mirror image to Sully, the investigators here are keen on sweeping everything on the rug and clearing his good name as quickly as possible–because when he was taken to the hospital, they of course performed routine blood-work and found his BAC was well over the recommended limits. The drama from the second-half of the film, then, comes from Denzel’s character having to make the difficult decision between using his newfound celebrity as a hero-pilot to cover up his intoxication, or to come clean, ruin his reputation, go to jail, but also finally get the help he needs to overcome his addictions. Though fictional, this at least is a much more compelling moral quandary than the manufactured drama of Sully (if still a little soap-operatic).
None of this is to insinuate that one film is better than the other; they both have their flaws and contrivances, but ultimately excel where it counts: portraying the plane crash. Whenever I start watching one scene on YouTube, I inevitably end up watching the other, too. It is my personal “Fiery Crash” whenever my wife leaves for work lately.
What both films also share in common, I suppose–as well as with the Andrew Bird track–is the reminder to never take your time on this earth for granted. You never know what the day will bring, and there is always less time than you think.