Not sure if and/or why I had succumbed to such a nefarious temptation, but perhaps it was an inverse reaction to my fearlessness of flying (take that, Erica Jong). I've always felt safe, perhaps even invulnerable; as I shrouded my fragile human form cargo with an impenetrable engineering marvel with double and triple redundancies as it shot me across the sky at hundreds of miles an hour (yes, there is a lousy attempt at sarcasm there).
I always felt lulled at takeoff, sometimes even slumbering through the first round of cabin service. If you too are a frequent traveler, you may remember that particular moaning sound of an Airbus 320 as it claws it's way into the sky. It's easy to imagine the popping of a rivet due to the airframe stress, and then in slow motion seeing that rivet being ingested by the powerful jet engine. The turbofan blades are torn apart in a shrieking cacaphony of tortured metal. Ooops! There I go again. I was reading a portion of Crichton's masterpiece "Airframe" once out loud to a friend who happened to be on the same flight and he almost got airsick (Steve, aren't you glad this wasn't you?).
Well, recently the Miami Herald reported that dozens of passengers were injured when the new Crown Princess cruise ship suddenly listed after leaving Port Canaveral. The article reports that:
"Chaos and panic engulfed the young Crown Princess ship Tuesday when it listed drastically to its left, throwing passengers and crew to the floor. Two people were critically injured, including a child, officials said. A dozen more suffered serious injuries and about 70 had lesser injuries. No deaths were reported, and the U.S. Coast Guard said all passengers and crew have been accounted for. The accident, apparently a result of problems with the ship's steering equipment, happened at 3:25 p.m. about 11 miles off the Florida coast as the Crown Princess sailed toward New York."
While I could make some witty sarcastic remark about attributing the disaster to Martha Stewart's christening of the ship with her legendary anger and shattering the champagne bottle so hard that the structural integrity of the ship was compromised, I'll refrain and point out something even more bizarre.
Believe it or not, the feature film scheduled for that night on the ship was the movie....Titanic.
