Flight
Remember those old Airport movies where a crippled airliner is saved from certain destruction because of the daring and resourceful pilot, flight crew and calm people on the ground?
Flight is only sort of like those movies. The difference is that Whip Whitaker (brilliantly played by Denzel Washington) is an addict. He stays up all night before piloting a flight from Orlando to Atlanta— boozing, doing lines of coke, and cavorting with his curvaceous flight attendant girlfriend (Nadine Velazquez). “You just might be the second Mrs. Whitaker,” he confides with morning-after sincerity.
Co-pilot Ken Evans (Brian Garaghty) greets Whitaker as if he smells trouble, and later, we learn that this is literally the case. “You stunk of gin or something,” says the Jesus-quoting Evans from his hospital bed.
Evans, Whitaker, and 94 of the original 102 souls on board the airliner are in hospital beds because they have survived the horrific crash resulting from a mid-air mechanical malfunction. An ominous thump cues the chair-arm-clutching action sequence. Following the thump, the co-pilot’s controls cease functioning; the plane nosedives; the hydraulics fail, the engines catch fire one by one and burn out; and when Whitaker asks his chief flight attendant (Tama Tunie) to say “I love you,” to her son for the “black box,” we assume everyone will soon be dead.
Except that Whitaker’s instincts take over. “Hold on, I’m going to invert the plane,” he announces. In non-aviation-speak, that means he’s going to fly upside down.
The physics of this would take up another column, but this feat is technically possible, and it could allow a skilled pilot to break out from a dive and fly horizontally. It also shows that director Robert Zemeckis knows his stuff, for when the plane finally came back to Earth, the entire movie audience exhaled with relief.
Hailed as a hero, Whitaker’s hospital blood tests reveal his feet of clay. Since six people died, flying in an “impaired state” means that he is liable for manslaughter charges and civil penalties. After Whitaker grudgingly accepts a Chicago defense attorney (Don Cheadle) hired by the airlines and the pilots union, he begins to learn a few legal tidbits. First, the blood test can be “easily made to go away,” and also that “technically,” Whitaker can only be brought up on four manslaughter charges—the two dead members of the flight crew are considered casualties of their dangerous profession.
But what about those drugs and booze? As an addict, Whitaker rationalizes to himself and others that using those substances may have been what enabled him to pull off the miraculous feat of flying. That, as we learn during the rest of the film, is delusional and self-destructive.
Morally ambiguous pilots are not a new idea in movies. If we flip back to look at the original Airport, pilot Captain Vernon Demarest, was played by Dean Martin—an actor whose TV and movie image actively perpetuated the idea that Martin drank like a fish and was slightly tipsy half the time. In the film, the married pilot not only downs four martinis the night before his cross-Atlantic flight to Rome, but finds out his stewardess* girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) is going to have his baby.
But that was 1970. Today, passengers might assume that commercial pilots are required to pass a drug test in order to fly a plane. In fact, a brief check of FAA rule 91.17(a)(3) could lead us to this conclusion: “No person may act or attempt to act as a crewmember of a civil aircraft while using any drug that affects the person’s faculties in any way contrary to safety.”
As always, the devil is in the details. Unless they are reported being under the influence by another member of the flight crew, the routine FAA physical does not test for alcohol use, and does not include a blood test that would reveal drug use. In fact, the only lab test routinely done by an Aviation Medical Examiner is a urine test for diabetes or kidney disease.
Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?
* Female flight attendants were called stewardesses back then.
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