It’s too early to point fingers. Good. The deaths of 150 people on flight 4U9525 are rendered meaningless if mourning can be skipped over on the way to blame, outrage, future guarantees. There will be time for all that. There always is. Meanwhile, though it changes nothing, Lufthansa and Germanwings have turned their logos black. Though he can’t possibly feel the loss himself, the Spanish king makes public his condolences, as he’s expected to do. Yet no matter how “careful” Chancellor Merkel’s promised investigation, little will change and even less will be learned. Technical details may matter to victims’ families in search of closure – and that’s quite right. But the truth is rarely in the black box. It’s in the moments between the distress call and the crash. The last thoughts and fears of the doomed. It’s many truths, and it’s unknowable.
The fact that crashes occur is not shocking any more. The circumstances might be – when planes disappear off the radar, or sink into the side of the World Trade Centre – these are dramas of an entirely different scale, which make even those who have never left the ground feel insecure too. But there have been so many planes downed in recent years that they are often simply forgotten. In 2005 the Helios Airways crash in Greece (121 deaths) was then the 69th crash of a Boeing 737. In England, the Kegworth air disaster of 1989 saw 47 dead on a British Midland flight. It’s not possible to compute such apparent random misery or remember so much of it. Does this explain why tragedies such as this have no effect on passenger numbers? That people can’t understand, so don’t try? Or more likely that they need to pretend it’s not happened in order to carry on?
If I’m honest, that’s it for me. I’m part of the first generation for whom travelling across Europe is an unremarkable thing. I don’t think of borders as barriers. I expect my flight to Dublin to be the same price as a cheap restaurant meal. It’s hard to make sense of all this, especially now that Europe is so drowned in easyJet et al, but in just a few years budget air travel has transformed the way Europe understands itself, its internal geography and psychology, even in its farthest corners. Those corners have been sucked inwards. In a sense, that’s liberating. It offers multiple possibilities. But it also allows multitudes to see new places without knowing anything about them. Technology, convenience and price dwarf other concerns for most passengers and what this leads to is a lot of movement, but little conscious engagement. When running for the next connection, there’s no time for anything meaningful anyway. And so, when crashes happen, is it any wonder that it seems to have no impact at all?
Maybe not quite no impact. Even for those undeterred from taking that last-minute weekend break in Berlin by the puncturing of the illusion of safety, you can’t just forget straight away. No matter how fleetingly, disasters like this make air travel seem impossible once more. They force onlookers to forget the mundanity of the airport queue for a moment and consider how magical it is that people can zip through the sky at all, that they do so thousands of times a day all over our planet, that some don’t even bother to look out of the window as they float smoothly over the Alps. It makes flight scary again, or at least makes us admit how vulnerable we all are each time we buy a ticket, complain at the lack of luggage space or the fact that whatsisname from Ryanair wants to charge for using the toilet. In fact, it suddenly seems amazing that disasters don’t happen more often. And yet, they remain totally, utterly unacceptable.
In the wake of the Germanwings crash, will anyone think twice before hopping to Berlin for the weekend, or surprising their partner with dirt-cheap flights to Barcelona? Probably not. Our societies are committed to this way of living. Horrors of this kind are so difficult to comprehend that they might as well be unreal – all that’s real, for the living, is that take-off has always been followed, thankfully, with safe landing. Still. That quickening of breath each time the plane jolts and dips in the sky, like it’s taking a punch, then recovering. It makes you wonder: is it worth it, all this? Have we been tricked into feeling safe? Then the turbulence passes, and we all carry on. It’s the only thing we can do.
