A Fear of Flying

I took an Alaska Airlines MD-80 from L.A. to Portland a few days ago and I couldn’t stop thinking about Flight 261.

Our plane passed over Anacapa Island at sunset, just about the time of day that 261 went down. Deep red streaks glowed on the horizon between dark layers of storm clouds.

I’m not superstitious, but at that moment it was like the ghost of a lost plane was soaring along with us, so similar were the circumstances.

The same kind of startling sunset crowned the same kind of plane’s last flight like a halo from heaven on the evening it crashed four weeks ago.

I felt like I was in the middle of an episode from “The Twilight Zone.” What next?

I’ve flown on large and small planes all over the world, some of which, I swear to you, had wings that flapped like a bird. A flight out of Dar es Salaam once made me believe in miracles.

I know flying is safe. More than 1,000 planes take off from LAX every day of the week and just about everyone aboard makes it to wherever they’re going. I’ve flown Alaska Airlines for years from Barrow to Burbank without Incident One. About 13 million passengers a year share the same good fortune.

But it was different the other day. Last month one of the MD-80s beat the odds and went down with 88 souls aboard, probably victims of a piece of metal only about so big.

That was on my mind as I boarded Flight 459. It wasn’t bothering me a lot until a passenger in front of me suddenly asked a stewardess, “Is this an MD-80?” She said yes and he said, “Oh, boy.”

*

Oh, boy.

I guess it was the way he said it that made me uneasy.

Oh, boy.

It’s funny how you can cram so much emotion into so few words. He was both afraid and resigned as he settled in the seat next to me.

He felt the rush of the takeoff and the roar of the engines and held his breath as the big jet soared toward starlight.

Another MD-80 was airborne. Oh, boy.

I remember reading in one of our stories after 261 dropped from the sky that plane crashes unleash one of the resident nightmares in our brain. We’re never far from the feeling that it could happen to us.

I was looking out the window at the sunset from Seat 10C wondering if it could happen to us, units of flesh and feeling, sailing along in a metal tube 30,000 feet off the ground.

A jet is put together with a zillion parts, any one of which could snap at a moment’s notice or fall loose or catch fire or just plain fail.

There are, of course, regular inspections, but a friend in Portland who is with a company that makes airplane parts says that maybe they aren’t inspected enough. If a part just barely meets qualifications one year it could fail before the next inspection a year later.

“Twenty hours of downtime are involved in replacing a horizontal stabilizer’s jackscrew,” he said, “plus 100 man-hours. It’s always a push between cost and safety.”

Oh, boy.

*

As I grow older I am taken with an odd sense of fatalism. A few days before boarding Flight 459 a pacemaker was implanted in my chest to control an erratic heartbeat.

I remember thinking as they wheeled me down a hallway at Tarzana Hospital that my view of a drab, soundproof ceiling might be the last thing I ever saw.

“What would you prefer?” my wife asked. She was walking with me to the operating room door. “A sunset,” I said. She promised me a hundred. I closed my eyes.

We place our trust in pilots and cardiologists and policemen to get us through life. It hurts when they let us down, even when we’re not the patient or the passenger who pays the price. We know only too well how much it hurts when cops fail us. Say Rampart and lower your head.

Because Flight 261 crashed into the sea so close to us, it was almost as though we’d lost family. News pages were filled with details. Television coverage seemed interminable.

A Kenya Airways plane crashed three days earlier off the Ivory Coast, killing 169, and by comparison we hardly noticed. Distance makes the difference, I guess. It wasn’t local. They were strangers.

The flights to and from Portland were uneventful. Stewardesses chirped like bluebirds, instructed, I suppose, to take our minds off 261 any way they could. We ate bean burritos that would have better served humanity patching holes in leaky roofs.

But we made it OK. I figured we would. But I still couldn’t help breathing a sigh of relief when my feet were on the ground. Oh, boy!

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.