The first flight went down at 6 a.m. It flickered then vanished from the flight tracker. Air traffic controllers couldn’t locate it until an hour later, when it appeared again on the Coast Guard’s radar, sinking off the coast of Key West. The flight had departed that morning from Miami under sunny skies on one of those breezy warm days like only South Florida gets in March. When the rest of the country seems thick with winter, like spring will never come. On days like this, you imagine nothing bad can happen. That nothing bad will happen.
The news reports that came in during the minutes and hours after Flight 6348 was found included speculations about causes: terrorism, faulty mechanicals, pilot error, and more. We watched as news helicopters circled the area and broadcast bits of debris floating atop aquamarine waves, warmed in the morning sun. A piece of a wing adrift in the ocean bobbed rhythmically, and what one of our comrades swore was a collection of boxed lunches thronged around the edges of a buoy as though desperate to escape the undertow.
The flight had been bound for Brazil. Eight hours, and the passengers would have stepped into the late evening light of Rio. They would have been rumpled, smelling of recycled air and food heated and reheated in the plane’s galley kitchens. Some would have searched out the face of a mother or brother standing on the other side of a baggage carousel. Others would hold their phones aloft, above their heads, trying to figure out if they got a signal there. They would try to put together the words to ask for a taxi in Portuguese. Or a woman. Or a hot meal. Some would have made their way briskly into the car park to get the vehicle left there a week or two earlier, happy to be home, to be back, to be safely returned to the place they belonged. Maybe they all would have lain their heads down that night and taken note of the way different countries have different smells, maybe spent time considering what in Brazil smelled different than in Miami. Was it the air? Maybe the sea? Perhaps they would’ve made their way out of bed for a glass of water or a cool shower. With dry eyes, with clammy hands, and the weariness that only travel can bring, they would have been safe. Would have been alive.
It would have been unusual to suppose or experience, then, a kind of grief, and so instead we noted the story. “So sad,” we said. “Those poor people,” we said. And then we checked the traffic on our phones. We updated our Facebook profile with a story snatched from CNN, or Fox News, or HuffPo. It was a general kind of sadness because we didn’t know anyone on board. We didn’t have friends on board. We didn’t have friends of friends on board. And we hadn’t ever even been to Miami. Or to Brazil. So we went about our day. We made coffee. We searched for our kids’ shoes in an effort to get them out the door. We got on the train and in our cars, and we commuted to work.
The next flight went down over Nebraska at 7:45 that morning. It was one of those short haul commuter flights where businesspeople click manicured fingernails over expensive laptops, pretending to work while playing Words with Friends or reading the seedy tabloids on the glowing faces of their tablets.
The next report we watched from a bar in the Financial District, while drinking early Friday-morning Bloody Marys, our sometimes-ritual after a particularly decadent Thursday night. That flight went down at 8:30 a.m., right outside of Newark. The blaze was nearly instantaneous, and the flames were aggressive. We swore, as did our companions, that we felt the heat on our faces and down our necks.
It was around this time that someone at one network—and then another, and then all of them—seemed to notice that all the planes coming out of the sky belonged to one airline. Delta. All of a sudden, anchors began discussing corporate sabotage, and headlines like “The Terrorists Among Us?” crawled their way across the bottom of each 24-hour news channel.
We prayed at the altar of Google. We asked: How does a black box work? How many planes crash each year? What color is the threat level today? Who hates America? What are my chances of dying in a plane crash? And then questions we hadn’t even thought of asking auto-filled after two or three or four words.
In the early hours of the workday, we weighed the odds. In the break room, we exchanged somber looks.
“I won’t fly them again,” declared Amanda from HR in a rare burst of decisiveness.
She usually asked our opinion, asked us to weigh the options with her, the benefits and disadvantages of reporting the co-worker who downloaded pornography onto his work computer. Last year, she’d talked us into putting a portion of our take-home pay into supplementary life insurance. She’d clucked her tongue and said, “You just never know.” And there it went, two percent of every paycheck, squirreled away for our husband, or our kids, or our worthless brother. We sipped our cold coffee, and wished bitterly that there was some way to get that money back, now that it seemed that Chicken Little was right, that the sky was falling. We took a moment to imagine the Jet Ski we would have bought. Or the vacation to Napa Valley. Or a new iPhone, or a pair of Christian Louboutins.
By 9:15, the President was on every screen offering assurances that everything was fine. “Flying is still okay,” and, “Don’t lose faith.” He talked about American exceptionalism. There were no threats of terrorists or mechanical issues they could find. “It is, for now, a mystery,” he said. Looking directly into the camera. “One we are working to solve.”
Why did we continue to board any planes that day, regardless of what the president said? And, in any event, why were we allowed to continue boarding? Did we want to cheat death? To hold it close, taste it, before pushing it back?
We went back to our classrooms, our office, to our customers in the coffee shop who had paused—as we had when he’d come onscreen—to find assurance. Two planes landed successfully, and the news channels gave us live feeds of air traffic controllers high-fiving and clapping sweaty palms on one another’s backs. We briefly reflected that this was the pivotal scene in any good disaster movie. Crisis over; Mission Accomplished; We’ve kicked this thing’s ass! We narrated our crises through Hollywood cliché. Flights began to go from red to green at the airports, and cautiously, tentatively, planes took off again from O’Hare, from Love Field, from Hartsfield-Jackson. From LAX. From Logan and from JFK. Our kids watched at recess as planes climbed a wall of sky, the mid-morning sun, still a touch too bright, offering a kind of reassurance that somehow this would be okay.
At 10 a.m., three planes went down simultaneously, as if pressed to the ground by an invisible force, an unobserved and giant hand. One in New Mexico. One right over the San Francisco Bay. And the last one, as it headed north toward Canada from Portsmouth, crashed off the coast near Kennebunkport. A reporter from the local Taos station on a live feed with MSNBC faded and crumpled to her knees. As the cameraman changed focus to catch the conflagration erupting behind her, our breath caught in our throats as we watched her drop to the earth like one of the planes.
We used our 140 characters to ask “Why???” and to abbreviate every crackpot theory, to hashtag every cry to Jehovah and send it into the abyss. #godblessamerica. Up went the emojis, the cognitive dissonance created through juxtaposition confusing most of us, even we students of semiotics and sign-speak. An airplane next to a kitten and a cellphone. A tiny “100” sticker, hands clasped together in prayer, and an eggplant. A rainbow with a frown-y face and a tiny purple-faced devil.
And then, then we started to know. We knew a co-worker’s cousin, a girl we’d gone to school with at P. S. 247, the brother-in-law of the barista at the Starbucks in the lobby. And how many was this now? How many dead? Delta couldn’t release names quickly enough. Their website crashed permanently at 11:17 a.m., an error message reading “Not found” over and over and over again, no matter how many times we hit refresh, no matter how many times we restarted our browser. As if we, too, were alone in the universe, not foundlings, with no digital trace.
We stopped talking then. The tap, tap, tap of fingernails against phone screens took over as we checked, making sure everyone was where they were supposed to be. Children in schools, parents at work. Scrolling through social media to see if there were friends on business trips or vacations.
We didn’t eat lunch that day. Just sat around and let the news roll over and around us. We saw news anchors with their eyes full of tears and felt sorry for them, felt sorry that they had to be in front of the camera during this. But what was this? CNN called it “Plane-Gate.” And Fox News used “Plane-aggedon.” And CBS news interrupted its broadcast with the tag line: “Crisis in the Skies.” What catchy name do you use when it seems the world is ending?
And people who already knew that they’d lost parents, a sister, or an aunt, they were on television telling us about what a good person their loved one was. How many people they helped, or loved, or cared for.
And on Facebook the memorials started, a trickle initially, and then a rolling wave of sadness and regret, weeping digitally, photos, narratives, more emojis. And for a while it seemed like every friend of a friend, or aunt, or uncle, or a cousin or a boyfriend or an ex, or a neighbor or a dentist or a doctor or a lawyer we’d once known, they’d perished on one of those planes. By noon, we could change our profile picture so that the colors of the American flag overlaid our image, like a gel on a spotlight, or a transparency of a plane landing safely projected on the wall.
In the early afternoon, two United flights took off and landed. A regional flight on Southwest made its way into the sky and back down again without incident. And in Atlanta, it seemed, people were going to get going again. Tarmacs cleared as flight after flight took off into the sky, the air traffic controllers sighing with relief. At 12:30, a short haul, Jacksonville to Tampa, took off, and we watched the plane rise successfully into the sky. It plummeted out of midair fifteen minutes later, free falling to the earth, and we all swore we heard the screams of the 117 souls aboard.
And then it stopped. No more planes. Neighborhoods near LAX, near BWI, those adjoining ABQ, all of them close to air traffic were silent. We came out of our homes and peered at our neighbors as though we had never seen one another in our lives. The quiet was so queer. Unprecedented. We looked at each other as though we might stumble upon an answer, as though perhaps the other person might explain it all. And we looked toward the sky as if the answer were there. And then we returned to our houses and turned on our televisions or our iPods or a movie, something, anything to drown out that lack of sound.
All regular programming for the day was totally suspended at this point. Even though it was the middle of the day, our schools’ parking lots were clotted with cars as we rushed to pull our children from class. In the high schools, our boys got into fights, our girls lay prostrate on hallway floors. Our middle schoolers hugged and shoved and hugged again. We tried to keep it all away from our smaller children, even as teachers bummed cigarettes and chain-smoked through recess, dabbing at our eyes, thinking that the children who died could have been our own students, were in fact someone’s students. Someone who would need much more than a cigarette that evening.
By 1 p.m., it looked like rush hour on our expressways and throughways and highways, as we bumped and honked and screamed our way home.
By 2 p.m., the roads had bled out, and travelers, stranded in airports, decamped to any motels or hotels that had available beds. School gymnasiums were repurposed by the Red Cross. Airports began to look like tent cities, our friends and our families huddled together around piles of luggage, and Starbucks employees passing out free coffee to those who would take it. The stench from the bathroom blew into the terminals any time someone came in or out.
#airportsstuck
#DamnDelta
#EndofDays
#Scared
#Terrorist
#Conspiracy
#Iwantmymommy
In the late afternoon, as the markets began to close, figures came out from NASDAQ, from the Dow Jones, from the S&P. Share prices plummeted on the ticker. We watched as Delta stock fell lower and lower on the NYSE, reaching ten dollars a share. Then eight dollars. Then four. We begged for the NYSE to close early, but the stock bottomed out at $3 just before the bell. One broker hit the floor at that moment. His knees buckled, and we gathered around, elevating his feet and patting him gently on the face.
“Who?” he murmured. And then, “Why?” As he tried to sit up, he looked around the room as if he didn’t recognize anyone.
When we left work in the evening, heading out onto empty roads and empty highways, it felt like the end of days. Someone had draped a sign on the chain-link fence above the overpass that read, “Pray for Delta.” One billboard near the college had been graffitied in pastel-and-black bubbled letters. “America Weeps.”
It felt wrong, somehow, to turn our lights on in the house, even as the day turned to dusk and the horizon alone was lit. No lights, but we left the cable news scrolling, and we watched footage replay in a loop, our television’s volume on mute. We watch those planes go down over and over again. The repetition of images like a chant, like a ceremony. And each time the loop began again, we hoped for something to save them this time, before they exploded against the earth, the fuselages erupting into flames.
We scrolled through our cell phones, our faces lit from below. More memorials, more names we recognized. More death, more sadness.
At 8:30, the sun’s light completely faded, after the President’s second address, the CEO of Delta—his eyes red, his hair unkempt, his suit rumpled in a way that was disquieting for how unfamiliar it looked—offered no answers.
“We don’t know,” he said. Again. And then, “We can’t say at this time.” And when the reporters pushed, he apologized. They kept pushing. Finally, he said, “It would be irresponsible of me to speculate.” And then, “Is that what you want? Speculation? Vultures . . .”
There was nothing more to say. At midnight most stations started playing the national anthem over an image of a waving flag, a remnant from the days before cable and the twenty-four-hour news channels. The names of the dead scrolled across screens in tiny letters, occasionally accompanied by pictures sent in from family members who had e-mailed them quickly enough.
Grandmothers and substitute teachers. War veterans, child actors, and former Olympians. Mail carriers. Our neighbor’s friend we’d met at the barbeque. It was too much sadness for any human heart to contain. But we didn’t cry. We weren’t hysterical. We were a nation shocked into an easy paralysis as the washed-out, blue light from our televisions, our telephones, our tablets, lit up our faces. Made us look half-dead, if we were still even half-alive.
As bedtime approached, our children asked, “Will I die in a plane crash, Mommy?” And, “What would have happened if your plane had taken off today, Daddy?” We didn’t answer, because we didn’t know. We hugged them close, perhaps too hard, perhaps scaring them in so doing. And some of us made drinks, or got high, or ate all of the baloney and bread in our refrigerators, because who could sleep now? Some of us prayed. Some of us wrote. Some of us Googled “signs of the apocalypse”: plagues, famines, earthquakes, rivers of blood.
Death had come, and it had taken strangers. And friends. And neighbors. Why wouldn’t death come quickly for us? Why wouldn’t it sneak in, unexpectedly and imperceptibly? Unexplained. The jarring certainty we had about our mortality was gone. Or if not gone, it was confused.
We don’t remember falling asleep. We don’t remember waking up.
But the next morning, we all remember hearing the sonic boom. Hearing the airplanes take off from every airport we knew, one at a time, even though it felt like they were ascending all at once, soaring all at once. And we hoped, we prayed that they would land safely, and that we would know why. We wanted to be returned to the unexpected, to the lovingly random nature of the universe, to a providence that could show us something to color the world anew.
Dionne Irving is originally from Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of the novel Quint from 7.13 Books, and a short story collection Islands is forthcoming from Catapult Books in 2022. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. She teaches in the University of Notre Dame Creative Writing Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience.
Photo by Brett Sayles