Each time when I travel by plane that’s for me an extreme life adventure. Simply because I am in the situation when I can not be anymore in full control of my life. I can only trust the science and knowledge of the few other people that surely must have a better knowledge than me about how to handle that science. These people are the Cabin Crew and they have knowledge in driving a plane. I love to travel by plane, but everytime I do this I feel a sort of emotions mixed with insecurity. I am already used with it, but not matter how much I try to pretend that everything is fine, that feeling of insecurity is always there. So it all starts from the moment I am already in my seat in the plane. For me every flight is a new exercise, but the feelings about insecurity are similar. For example when I fly from Brussels to New York, it happens like this: As soon as the aircraft doors are closed, and we push back from the gate at Brussels Airport, a voice announce the beginning of the pre-flight safety briefing as follows:
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this Delta Airlines flight to New York. Before our departure, may we have your attention while the cabin crew point out the safety features aboard this aeroplane.”
Now let me break this down: I always find this a disconcerting way to start a flight. I am convinced that it’s a fake: that the safety briefing isn’t really about safety at all. From the start, they fail to mention the tens of thousands of liters of aviation fuel on board, namely Kerosene. It is the enormous amount of energy contained in this liquid that allows us to fly at all; Hence, why is it not mentioned in the pre-flight safety briefing?
On board the aircraft, the pre- flight safety briefing for my trip to New York was in full swing and now the flight attendants too were ignoring the importance of kerosene. There had not been the least mention of it so far, even though this revolutionary stuff was, at that very moment, being sprayed into the jet engines under the plane’s wings to power our aircraft as it taxied to the runway. Instead they were talking about what to do in the event of ´loss of cabin pressure’. As a native English speaker I do appreciate the understated nature of this phrase. It sounds like no big deal, but what it means is that while cruising at high altitude, if the cabin suddenly developed a hole or a crack, all the air would be sucked out of the aircraft, along with anyone not strapped into their seat. There wouldn’t be enough oxygen to breathe normally, hence the oxygen masks that are designed to drop down from the ceiling. The aircraft would immediately begin a steep descent to reach lower altitudes, where there is more oxygen. Anyone left alive at that point would indeed be safe. Generally, cruising altitude at which most planes fly is between 10.000 and 12.000 meters. This is the altitude at which air offers the least resistance so planes can travel faster with less fuel.
Yet there was still no word of the kerosene. The safety briefing had got to the bit about emergency exits and the flight attendant in front of me was shooting out his arms, fingers extended to identify their location. There were 2 exits behind me, and 2 at the front of the aircraft, and 2 over the wings, I was told. I wanted to add: “and there are 50,000 litres of kerosene in the fuel tank below our feet, and another 50,000 litres stored in each of the two wings of the aircraft”.
Actually for example the Aeroplane Airbus A330-200’s fuel tank has around 120,000 liter capacity. To refuel it at a normal gas station, it would take 72 hours or 3 days. But usually at the airport, refueling only takes 30 to 45 minutes.
And yet the sheer embodied energy in the kerosene propelled us forward faster and faster; a fuel with more power than nitroglycerine was being harnessed at a rate of 4 litres per second. By now our aircraft was nearing the end of the 3,5 km-long runway, traveling at 260 km/h. This is arguably the most dangerous moment of the flight. There wasn’t much runway left, and if we didn’t get airborne quickly, we would run off the end, ploughing into the buildings there with thousands of litres of liquid kerosene in our fuel tanks. And yet majestically, like a goose taking off from a lake, we climbed into the sky, leaving behind all the buildings, cars and people on the ground in a matter of seconds. This is the moment I love most about flying – especially when it involves flying through the low clouds of Brussels into the bright sunshine above as we did that day. It feels like entering another realm of existence and I never tire of it. But above the clouds I wasn’t, if I’m honest, thinking about this. Instead I was marveling at the cloudscapes and looking forward to having a drink from the trolley, which was now happily trundling down the aisle. Many people who are frequent plane travelers are telling me that I shouldn’t worry at all about flights and just relax giving me the standard expression something as follows:
“Relax. Flying is the safest form of long-distance travel- do you know that every day there are more than a million humans flying in the stratosphere – the chance of anything bad happening is minuscule. No, it’s smaller than minuscule. Sit back. Relax. Read a book.”
Yeah sure, it is the safest indeed, and as I said at the beginning of this post I enjoy flying. When I have flights on long distance such as from Europe to USA or Europe to Asia, I always have a book or 2 with me. I am totally ok with it; but everytime I look out the window or the plane goes through a turbulence zone while on the fly, even if is safest way of traveling, I do have that feeling of insecurity, no matter how much I relax myself.
In the history of my travels by plane I did experience few time that drop of pressure due to some turbulence. I still remember some years ago I was returning home from Canary Islands, 2 times just before the landing for few seconds the turbulence were so strong that I literally felt that the plane is falling. For sure flying is the safest way of traveling, but when the things start to become critical there is also a minor chance to come out alive. So I would say, yes flying is the safest way of traveling but can become (even if extremely rare) a deadly adventure too.
Now just to put things into perspective, let’s compare Kerosene with Nitroglycerine.
At the first glance, if we compare the 2, we easily can observe that at as little as possible mishandling of nitroglycerine it can turn in a devastating result Nitroglycerin is highly explosive liquid and is difficult to keep under control. Yet Kerosene is 10 times more powerful than Nitroglycerine but is not immediately explosive, this stuff can be fully kept under control. So for this reason humans can safely fly with the help of kerosene. Yet, if Kerosene is out of control it can destroy much harder than nitroglycerin. Therefore How safe is Kerosene? I often wonder myself – trying to relax everytime I travel by plane.
While in my seat inside the plane, and start to read a book, before to take-off my attention snapps back to the flight attendants when they present the safety instructions at the beginning of the flight. They get to the bit in the safety briefing about the life jackets. They are aIl wearing one while pretending to blow a whistle. Then I wonder what it would feel like to survive a crash landing on the sea and be floating in water, perhaps at night, trying to blow the whistle, I also wonder what would happen to the kerosene in our fuel tanks in the event of such crash. Could it explode? Maybe yes, maybe no , but I do know one liquid that certainly could: nitroglycerine.
The 100 ml limit on liquids carried in hand-baggage in aeroplanes is designed to prevent someone from bringing on board a large enough quantity of a liquid explosive such as nitroglycerine to destroy a plane. This amount of nitroglycerine will still explode, of course, but not with enough energy to bring the plane down. But, still, it is sobering to think that kerosene contains 10 times more energy per litre than nitroglycerine and there are tens of thousands of litres of it in the fuel tanks of an aeroplane.
Therefore, Kerosene as long as handled properly is is not an explosive though – in case of potentially plane damage kerosene will not spontaneously explode. That’s because unlike nitroglycerine, it doesn’t have any oxygen and nitrogen atoms in its molecular structure. It is a stable molecule that doesn’t readily decompose. You can bash it, smash it or have a bath in it and it still won’t explode. Unlike its less powerful cousin, nitroglycerine, if you want to harness the power of kerosene, you have to work for it – you need to make it react with oxygen. This means you must bring kerosene from liquid state into vapour state. As the kerosene and the oxygen react, they will create carbon dioxide (CO2) and steam, but because the reaction is limited by its access to oxygen, the combustion can be controlled. It is the huge power of kerosene, and our ability to burn it in a controlled manner, that makes it such an important liquid technologically. That’s the reason why we can safely use kerosene to power a plane.
Still, as much as we like to think we’ve got kerosene under control, there’s none the less a sinister side to it. As one of the most striking example , The horrors of 11 September 2001, are a case in point. On that day I was at home, staring in disbelief at the television. In truth I can’t remember if I saw live footage of the second plane flying into one of the twin towers or whether what I saw was a news recap, but it stunned me. I stood looking dumbfounded at the telly trying to comprehend the scene. The two buildings were on fire, and there were reports of other planes being flown into targets elsewhere. It seemed like things couldn’t get any worse, and then they did: the 1st tower came down, collapsing in the type of slow motion that only giant objects can do. And then the 2nd tower came down. We were ready for it this time, but it was no less numbing.
It was the fuel from the aircraft that caused the towers to collapse. It wasn’t an explosion, because kerosene is stable. According to the FBI report, the kerosene reacted with oxygen from the winds blowing through the buildings’ damaged floors, raising the temperature on those floors to over 800°C. This did not melt the steel frame of the building – steel melts at temperatures exceeding 1500°C – but at 800°C, the strength of steel decreases to approximately half its original strength and so it started to buckle. Once one floor buckled the weight of the entire building above it collapsed on to the floor below causing it to buckle, and so on, like a house of cards. In total more than 2,700 people were killed in the collapse of the twin towers, including 343 New York firefighters. These terror attacks were a significant moment in the history of the world, not just because they initiated wars and all the horrors that go with them, but because the fall of those towers was such a powerful symbol of the fragility of democratic civilization. And the active ingredient of that moment of destruction was the planes’ kerosene.
So you can see why I would think they might mention it in the safety briefing. But like I said during the pre-flight safety instruction on board, each time their presentation is ended, and they do not say a thing about the 120,000 litres of kerosene on board, nor comment on its dual nature: how, on the one hand, it’s a perfectly ordinary transparent oil, one so stable that you could throw a lighted match into the fuel tank and it wouldn’t ignite; and yet, on the other, mixed with the right amount of oxygen, it becomes an oil 10 times as powerful as the explosive nitroglycerine.
Therefore most people traveling by plane have completely no clue about all these and they just (want to) look relaxed. When in fact we are literally flying with a “bomb” that if well controlled can indeed bring us anywhere in the world faster than any other way of traveling. But if things are getting seriously out of control then flying is definitely not anymore safe at all. Although kerosene is not mentioned explicitly in the pre-flight safety briefing it occurs to me that it is nevertheless hidden in there somehow. If you think about it, the safety briefing is the one global ritual that we all share, whatever our ethnicity, nationality, sex or religion; we all take part in it before the kerosene is ignited and the plane takes off. The dangers that the briefing warns us of, such as landing on water, are so rare that even if you flew every day for a whole lifetime you would be unlikely ever to experience them. So that’s not really the point of it.
Like all rituals, the language is coded and involves a special series of actions and the use of props. In religious rituals these props are often candles, incense burners and chalices; in the pre-flight safety ritual they are oxygen masks, life jackets and seatbelts. The message of the pre-flight ritual is this:
“you are about to do something that is extremely dangerous, but engineers have made it ALMOST completely safe.”
The ‘‘almost” is emphasized by all the elaborate actions involving the previously mentioned props. The ritual draws a Iine between your normal life, where you are in charge of your own safety, to your current one, where you are ceding control to a set of people and their engineering systems as they harness one of the most awesomely powerful liquids on the planet to shoot you through the atmosphere to a destination of your choosing. In other words, you need to trust them absolute. Your life is in their hands; and so this ritual, performed before every flight, is really a trust ceremony.
In my plane trip to from Brussels to New York as the cabin crew began moving down the aisles, ostensibly checking that passengers’ seatbelts were correctly fitted and bags were stowed, I knew that the safety ritual was coming to a close – this was the final blessing. I nodded to the steward solemnly. The aircraft had arrived at the runway, and begun its takeoff procedure, and so the accumulated knowledge of more than a thousand years was being brought to, bear to turn liquid kerosene into flight.
Leave a Reply