Cockpit Confidential Read Online Free PDF Page B

It is, at once, the most richly promising and bottomlessly lonely image. All the potential of flight is encapsulated in that shutter snap; yet we see, at heart, two eager brothers in a seemingly empty world, one flying, the other watching. We see centuries of imagination—the ageless desire to fly—in a desolate, almost completely anonymous fruition.
    I own a lot of airplane books. Aviation publishing is, let’s just say, on a lower aesthetic par than what you’ll find elsewhere on the arts and sciences shelves. The books are loaded with glam shots: sexily angled pictures of landing gear, wings, and tails. You see this with cars and motorcycles and guns too—the sexualization of mechanical objects. It’s cheap and it’s easy, and it misses the point. And unfortunately, for now, respect for aircraft has been unable to rise above this kind of adolescent fetishizing.
    What aviation needs, I think, is some crossover cred. The Concorde and the 747, with their erudite melding of left- and right-brain sensibilities, have taken it close. Still, you won’t find framed lithographs of 747s in the lofts of SoHo or the brownstones of Boston, hanging alongside romanticized images of the Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. And I may not feel vindicated until commercial aviation gets its own ten-part, sepia-toned Ken Burns documentary.
    Until then, when it comes to popular culture, movies are the place we look first. One might parallel the 1950s dawn of the Jet Age with the realized potential of Hollywood—the turbine and Cinemascope as archetypal tools of promise. Decades later, there’s still a cordial symbiosis at work: a lot of movies are shown on airplanes, and airplanes are shown in a lot of movies. The crash plot is the easy and obvious device, and more than thirty years later, we’re still laughing at Leslie Nielsen’s lines from the movie Airplane . But I’ve never been fond of movies about airplanes . For most of us, airplanes are a means to an end, and often enough, the vessels of whatever exciting, ruinous, or otherwise life-changing journeys we embark on. And it’s the furtive, incidental glimpses that best capture this—far more evocatively than any blockbuster disaster script: the propeller plane dropping the spy in some godforsaken battle zone or taking the ambassador and his family away from one; the beauty of the B-52’s tail snared along the riverbank in Apocalypse Now ; the Air Afrique ticket booklet in the hands of a young Jack Nicholson in The Passenger ; the Polish Tupolevs roaring in the background of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue IV .
    Switching to music, I think of a United Airlines TV ad that ran briefly in the mid-1990s—a plug for their new Latin American destinations. The commercial starred a parrot, which proceeded to peck out several seconds of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” on a piano. “Rhapsody” has remained United’s advertising music and makes a stirring accompaniment to the shot of a 777 set against the sky.
    We shouldn’t forget the late Joe Strummer’s reference to the Douglas DC-10 in the Clash’s “Spanish Bombs,” but it’s the Boeing family that’s the more musically inclined. I can think of at least four songs mentioning 747s (Nick Lowe’s “So It Goes” being my favorite).
    Somehow, the Airbus brand doesn’t lend itself lyrically, though Kinito Mendez, a merengue songwriter, paid a sadly foreboding tribute to the Airbus A300 with “El Avion” in 1996. “How joyful it could be to go on flight 587,” sings Mendez, immortalizing American Airlines’s popular morning nonstop between New York and Santo Domingo. In November 2001, the flight crashed after takeoff from Kennedy airport, killing 265 people.
    My formative years, musically speaking, hail from the underground rock scene, covering a span from about 1981 through