A Very Different South Korean Boeing

Don’t fly on an airline whose site is confined to Internet Explorer and whose functions, including reservations, are carried out on different browsers “with limited capacity.” I thought that sites worse than the one governing our railway lines didn’t exist. As it turns out, they do. I personally don’t have to fly Asiana Airlines; it’s just that since morning, all the headlines are about Asiana’s Boeing 777 Flight 214 from Seoul to San Francisco. So far, for unknown reasons, the plane landed on its tail, sent a million broken bits of debris onto the runway on the edge of the ocean and caught fire. The plane was packed.

In a world stuffed with communications gadgets, photographs and video appeared all over the Web. It’s like a meteor — an event now making the rounds not so much among professionals as among amateurs with iPhones and simple Androids. Now Flight 214 is in an emergency landing; now it’s crashing; now it’s catching fire — all practically in real time.

A passenger wrote on Twitter: “I just crash-landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine. I’m OK. Surreal.”

The professionals are not far behind — Fox News is already interviewing people that were waiting to welcome the arrivals. On screen, a man with clear eyes is calmly answering journalists’ questions, it seems. His face is basically calm, except that every so often he is strangely biting his lip. In response to the question, “Were you scared?” the man’s eyes become even calmer. “What do you think, if my 18-year-old child could’ve died on that flight?”* There was something like 220 people on board.**

Representatives from Asiana Airlines quickly stated that the plane could not have crashed due to engine problems. However, it is unclear where they came up with such a controversial statement. Probably on Internet Explorer or, more likely, on Netscape. Stuck in the Stone Age, faith in them just doesn’t exist.

But for the firefighters and emergency crew, who were the first on the scene of the burning flight, it didn’t matter whether or not there were problems with the engine. It didn’t matter if the landing system had turned itself off on the runway — they simply did their job. Obama praised them as quickly as Asiana Airlines stripped themselves of responsibility.

“We purchased the airplane in April, and there cannot be any mechanical problems with it,” said Yoon Young-Du, the airline’s spokesman.***

Two hundred people on board could have become the next victims of monstrous progress. But they didn’t. As is known today, two Chinese girls were killed and 181 people were taken to the hospital, 49 with critical injuries. That is tragic, but at least it doesn’t have the typical tragic tone of “no survivors on board.” Moreover, it seems that this is one of the most successful catastrophes, if one strives to use the word catastrophe in some sort of pleasant context. Two dead out of 200-something — we will pray for those in critical condition, but they have already survived the worst. From here on, everything will be good.

Boeing 777s are not made like other planes. They finally took into account the opinions of ordinary passengers in the design process. Focus groups were introduced into the closed world of aviation construction to undertake different kinds of targeting, from marketing to research into the usability of an enormous plane — this isn’t some fledgling start-up that you’re ingratiating to a bunch of cretins, after all. And yet it turned out pretty well: This plane is considered one of the most comfortable out there according to passengers. And despite everything else that happened, in general the machine turned out not too bad at all, sliding down the runway. The tail broke off and the motors, as well as the cabin, only experienced a fire. Judging by how effectively and almost without casualties the rescue operation was carried out on those inflatable slides, it seems that the crew was well-prepared too — especially the flight attendants, who guided people away from the crash in a timely manner.

This crash has shown that the old myth about the tail being the safest place on the airplane is just that: nothing more than a myth. The two dead Chinese girls — ages 16 and 17 — were sitting in the very back, and their bodies were found outside the airplane.

Asiana is the second biggest airline carrier in South Korea after Korean Air. Since Soviet times, I get nervous when I hear the phrase “South Korean Boeing.” But to that rotten rebuttal, “Look, their planes also crash,” there can only be one response — the human factor disappears only in a world devoid of people. Build, race and economy can only barely adjust for the number of human errors and degrees of negligence. When the process is done correctly, one group of people can insure another group of people from these human errors or at least quickly liquidate the effects of these mistakes, reducing losses to a minimum. It seems that in this case, the flight attendants and the emergency crew were the ones who brought the losses to a minimum.

And the world sighed with relief and thought, “Airlines, start using Safari with Chrome already: In the twenty-first century it will support not only the 777s, but also Firefox, and you will be happy.”

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.

**Editor’s note: There were 307 passengers on board.

***Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, appears differently on several news sites: “We purchased this airplane in March 2006 … Currently we understand that there are no engine or mechanical problems.”