the blazing dream of my head is crawling out

Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) observation by eleggua

In 1990, a British Airways BAC One-Eleven, captained by Tim Lancaster and co-piloted by Alastair Atchison, was cruising at 17,000 feet.

Around 15 minutes after take-off, flight attendant Nigel Ogden entered the cockpit to bring the pilots something to drink. One second everything was fine. The next second, the pilot's side window blew out from the force of the pressurized cockpit. Even though he was strapped in, the force of the explosive decompression ripped the captain out of his chair and pulled him though the window.

The flight attendant immediately leapt forward and grasped the captain's belt. The force was so strong - due to the plane's speed - the captain slipped and was pulled almost entirely out of the plane, but the flight attendant caught his leg. The captain laid on the roof, then the side of the fuselage (the above image is an inaccurate recreation - the side window was smashed) and the flight attendant's entire arm was soon outside of the plane, gripping him.

(Recreation from the show Mayday at the point of decompression)

At the same time, the event caused the autopilot to disengage, and the captain's body hitting the flight controls caused the plane to enter into a deep dive. The throttle was set to full power and could not be accessed due to debris, meaning the plane was descending rapidly. The co-pilot, experiencing hypoxia, fought to control the plane's dive while allowing it to continue descending to a level the passengers/crew could breathe at. He attempted to contact air traffic control, but the wind made communication impossible, so he broadcast a mayday signal. Finally, he was able to re-engage the autopilot and level the plane out at a breathable altitude.

Soon, the flight attendant's entire arm was burned from wind shear and frostbite, and his grip began to slip. The other attendants entered the cabin to see what was wrong and took over holding the captain's body. Seeing the blood covering the windows from the captain's severe wind sheer burns and frostbite, the attendants and co-pilot knew he was dead. However, they could not let his body go because it could smash into the wing, horz stabilizer, or engine, and bring the plane down.

For 30+ minutes the co-pilot flew a jet plane with an OPEN WINDOW and his co-worker's body hanging along the side of the plane. Finally, clearance to land from ATC came across over the sound of the wind and the flight attendants were able to dislodge the captain's ankles from the flight controls without letting him go. The co-pilot successfully landed the plane.

(tw below for blood)

(Taken same day as the incident)

BUT HERE'S THE KICKER: when they reached the ground and evacuated, they realized THE CAPTAIN WAS NOT DEAD.

He SURVIVED being outside the fuselage of a jet airplane traveling 550mph at 17,000 feet. His only injuries were extensive - but mostly superficial - frostbite and windshear burns, bruising, fractures in his hand, and shock. He has since stated that he remembers the event and was conscious for much of the time he was outside of the fuselage. The only other injury was the flight attendant's frostbitten/windshorn arm. Captain Tim Lancaster returned to flying five months later.

(Captain Tim Lancaster in bed several weeks after the incident, with flight attendant Ogden (+ Ogden's wife) above him and co-pilot Alastair Atchison to the far left, along with the two other flight attendants)

Why did this occur? Because the plane had received maintenance the day before, and the maintenance supervisor did not check he was using the correct screws in re-installing the windscreen.

(Recreation)

Just a note that I was wrong - it was the front pilot's windscreen, not the side-window! I'm used to looking at Boeing windows with different positions :)

The ‘maintenance supervisor did not check the bolts’ is technically correct but ignores the amount of stuff that had to go wrong for that to happen.

1: the supervisor was the one doing the bolts (I think there was a staffing issue) and so did not have to check the work that he did

2: the window was not on the list of vital components that need to be checked by someone else even if the supervisor does it.

3: the parts store where he had to go to get the bolts was badly lit and had bolts in the wrong drawers.

4: the wrong bolts and the right bolts are almost indistinguishable by sight.

5: the correct tool to put the screws in was not available so they had to do some lite bodging to get the screws in. By this I mean it was still a torque wrench and they checked it released at the right point but the correct socket did not stay in place or something like that.

6: any slight differences between the right bolts and the wrong bolts were hidden because of the tool they were using (which would have worked perfectly if they were using the right bolts).

From Wikipedia:

“The Swiss cheese model of accident causation illustrates that, although many layers of defense lie between hazards and accidents, there are flaws in each layer that, if aligned, can allow the accident to occur. In this diagram, three hazard vectors are stopped by the defenses, but one passes through where the "holes" are lined up.”

Yes, it’s often hard to say things for sure about history. The farther back you go the harder it is to be confident about what happened; the more recent an event, meanwhile, the more politically fraught the interpretations are. All history is interpretation, drawing inferences, trying to construct narratives about who and what and why based on the information we have. Original sources (letters, diary entries, newspaper reports) are biased. Archaeological discoveries are interpreted by archaeologists. Multiple interpretations for certain people and events are very common. A lot of the time, the best we can say is “this was PROBABLY that” or “these were PROBABLY NOT used for this.” However, qualifications and details like this for every fact that needs one are hard to reduce and are the reason history books exist. So like, was Louisa May Alcott trans? I do not think the evidence supports it. Was James Barry trans? I do think the evidence supports it. Those are interpretations, yeah. And this is the eternal complexity of history, that historians don’t always agree with each other about what historical evidence means, and that is often informed by their biases, but it also does not mean they don’t actually know anything and that your complete lack of studying any of this creates just as valid an interpretation.

And this is something where I ENCOURAGE you to do your own research! Read the historical sources! Learn about who was writing them and why! Read about the social context of the time and place! Read the people’s own words, or read the archaeological reports! I will gladly help you get your hands on any I can! Doing your own research should mean doing research, though. Not just assuming you know better by virtue of being queer or a leftist.

(fatherly voice): yes little johnny. you must learn to play the clarinet, because I never got the chance when I was a boy. (little johnny voice): well you got the chance now. why don't you learn it now?

I was talking with another trans person earlier, and we were talking about relationships with our respective moms. they were talking about how their transition was being viewed by their mom as something being done to her.

I was talking about a similar thing with my mom's feelings about my surgeries. I was jokingly saying, as if to my mom, "the things I do to my own body actually don't affect yours at all, because we have two different bodies. that one is yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. but this one is mine."

this is honestly something I think is really pervasive with parents, even outside of the context of being trans.

with my own mom, I know she deeply resented the patriarchal way she was raised. I know (because she's told me such) that part of the reason she wanted kids was to prove that she could raise a boy and a girl equitably. It was very important to her to "have one of each."

what she never said explicitly, but I've sort of come to realize must be the case, is that on some level her desire was to re-parent herself. she wanted the experience of getting to raise herself the way she wished her parents had raised her. she wanted to see what kind of life she would have had if she had gotten the same opportunities as her brothers.

on some level, this feels almost progressive. a laudable goal. but the thing is, it's an impossible desire. you can't raise yourself. you are always going to be raising an entirely separate person.

I am not my mom. her raising me was not her raising herself; it was her raising someone who had never existed before. every effort to preemptively treat me as she wished she was treated, to make predictions about my life based on her own, or to encourage her own interests far past when I communicated not liking them, was often a kind of a replacement for asking how I wanted to be treated, asking what I wanted from my life, or asking what I was interested in. Instead of learning about me, she wanted to shape me.

I think this is so common. This desire to give a child all the things that the parent wanted as a kid seems so generous and heartfelt from the point of view of the parent. But for the kid, it often ends up in continuous signals that everything they might want, enjoy, or become needs to be justified through the lens of fulfilling this parental fantasy.

there is a sense of duty to live the life the parent wants, because the parent couldn't. then this child doesn't get to live their life either, and might grow up and have their own child and parent with the same approach. sometimes there's generations upon generations of everyone living their parent's life instead of their own.

eventually I think parents all do need to take stock of what they really want out of being a parent.

as a parent, you cannot raise yourself. you can only raise a new person in the world. if you are grieving the lack of support you had to be yourself growing up, you are not going to successfully recreate yourself through forcing a child to pretend to be you. if you really wished you learned to play the clarinet as a kid, you need to stop displacing that wish onto your child and recenter it. this grief that drives the desire to create oneself through one's child relies on the belief in one's own life somehow already being over. it relies on a profound sense that it's "too late" (to ask to be treated differently, to pursue certain interests, or to become someone new). but unless you're dying, this belief is not accurate. there is still time. learn the clarinet now. you've got the chance now.