Comedian Jimmy Fallon recited a limerick on ‘The Tonight Show’ earlier this month, in front of a live audience at the Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Spring break, the students were going.
Excited, they all were a-glowing.
Then they let out a squeal,
Lost the door and the wheel,
Guess they shouldn’t have flown on a Boeing.
The live audience laughed.
The joke’s success depended on everyone in the audience knowing that the emergency exit door on a Boeing 737 went missing when the plane was at 16,000 feet. The door plug of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 fell off a few minutes after take off from Portland International Airport on January 5. The plane made an emergency landing and no one was seriously injured.
But certain feelings were hurt.
Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, wasn’t laughing at Jimmy Fallon’s limerick. In fact, she was so far from laughing that she took to posting on ‘X’ (formerly ‘Twitter’).
I didn’t find anything even mildly humorous in her post. Maybe Jennifer Homendy doesn’t have a sense of humor. At least, not about airplane accidents.
Other people who were not laughing at Jimmy Fallon’s limerick? The management and shareholders at Boeing.
I’ve flown occasionally, and often, in Boeing airplanes. Usually, when the plane has reached cruising altitude, the flight attendants run through a little comedy routine that involves instructions about where the emergency exists are located; how to fasten your seat belt; how to put on, and inflate, a life vest; and what might happen if the cabin suddenly loses pressure.
Just to get the audience into a relaxed mood.
No one pays attention to this routine. We’ve heard it a dozen times before, and the jokes are really not that funny. The only part that I really enjoy is when the flight attendant demonstrates how the little yellow oxygen mask drops out of the ceiling (“should the cabin experience sudden pressure loss…”)
We naturally assume that the airplane actually has oxygen masks hidden in the ceiling. Not that we expect to ever use them.
Based on the photos I’ve seen of the interior of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, the audience must have experienced a loss of cabin pressure when the door went missing. Which means, the yellow oxygen masks must have dropped out of the ceiling. I bet that looked funny when it happened. A hundred little yellow masks, all magically appearing at the same moment?
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to laugh when you’re wearing an oxygen mask.
According to the stories I’ve come across regarding Boeing’s recent screw-ups, the door disappeared because someone forgot to install the bolts that attach the door to the plane. Maybe they forgot, or maybe it was a practical joke. You can never tell about these things.
Turns out, Boeing had done repairs to the door before delivering it to Alaska Airlines.
National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy explained, to the U.S. Department of Justice (a humorless bunch of people if there ever was one), that the NTSB had requested from Boeing a list of the employees who might have re-installed the door without including the necessary bolts.
Reportedly, Boeing had taken security camera footage of the repair work. As Ms. Homendy noted in a letter to the pertinent Senate Committee:
To date, we still do not know who performed the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug on the accident aircraft. Boeing has informed us that they are unable to find the records documenting this work. A verbal request was made by our investigators for security camera footage to help obtain this information; however, they were informed the footage was overwritten. The absence of those records will complicate the NTSB’s investigation moving forward.
Can’t find the records of who did the repair work. Overwrote the security camera footage.
Does anyone else find this to be funny?
The NTSB will hold a two-day investigative hearing on the door plug incident in August, the agency announced on Tuesday. (The agency held similar hearings last year on the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.). Maybe Boeing can find the missing documents by August?
When I was in elementary school, we were instructed not to jump off the swings. But we did it anyway. The feeling of flying through the air was just too good to pass up.
Yes, one of my classmates broke his arm jumping from the swing, but that was an accident.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.