When ‘justice’ flies in stormy weather
View(s):Aircraft rarely fall out of the sky. But when they start to do so, it seems like a deluge. The past fortnight was a case in point. First there was the ill-fated MH17 – adding severe injury (298 surmised dead) to the serious insult (239 surely missing) of the MH370 mystery of earlier this year. And burdening an already under pressure Malaysia Airlines by a ton or more… to say nothing of guilt, secrecy, and financial tensions. Then came the typhoon-fuelled tragedy as a Taiwanese airliner plummeted out of a leaden heaven over Magong, near Penghu Island, costing a further 48 lives (with 10 survivors). And the news that an Air Algerie plane – an 18-year-old MD83 – had crashed in Niger (or northern Mali, as some reports had it) – to the tune of 118 dead – had aviation buffs, conspiracy theorists, and amateur number-crunchers sit up and say “Whiskey! Tango! Foxtrot!” in several international tongues.
A piece of the fuselage among the scattered debris of the ill-fated MH17 (AFP)
In a classroom mental note from my school days, I seem to recall from a statistics session that air safety enjoyed a ratio of 1:99,999,993. Which is to say that – if my math acumen serves me well, and doesn’t trash either my memory or traduce my pure maths teacher – 7 out of every 100,000,000 flights can be expected to crash, ‘pancake’ on the tarmac, or come a-cropper in a kaleidoscope of spectacular ways. The point was made on yours truly’s impressionable schoolboy cranium that air travel was very, very safe indeed.
Or comparatively so. This fortnight proved the exception when 5 out of those statistical 7 proved to be the exceptions that set the rule in a single ghastly series (or so it seems: this veritable deluge of gravity-bound crane-like machines). The latest instalment in aeronautical tragedy was earlier this week when a small light plane made an emergency landing on the strand Stateside in Sarasota County, Florida, killing a man on the sand and hospitalizing his critically wounded daughter. There was also the case of the intrepid young-at-17 aviator whose round-the-world attempt ended in 
a soggy death for him and his father (58) in the unrelenting waters of the Pacific.
Lightning also falls out of the sky.
As we know is customary in tropical monsoonal Sri Lanka, and also this week in Mediterranean California where a bolt from the blue literally shocked a man to death and shook up his fellow sojourners on Venice Beach. Bystanders saw a blazing light and heard something like a sonic boom. “The whole place trembled.” “We got zapped.” “My hair was standing up.” So said some of the lucky-to-be-alive survivors. Lightning, like the ideal justice, shows no favourites.
Justice also – sometimes – falls out of an otherwise unfruitful sky.
Or so one might be tempted to think, when – contrary to all expectations, norms, customs, traditions, and conventional wisdom – a judgment is rendered which has all free- and fair-thinking people everywhere nodding in assent and even applauding (albeit silently, in this case perhaps?). You know the case I mean… the one where the murderer of the murdered aid worker and the gang-leader of the goons who chain-raped the dead man’s inamorata got his comeuppance from a gutsy magistrate. Feel like weeping tears of joy mixed with pain at the gruesome remembrance of the dastardly deed and violent aftermath? Understand this… lots of unseen factors make justice – like lightning – fall out of the sky. Least said, soonest saved from being in contempt of courts celestial and terrestrial!
Interesting that justice being not only done, but being seen to be done, and being seen to be done as a thing needing doing under the circumstances – and not as a matter of course (like lightning, or aircraft this week, falling out of the sky) is considered an irony for our blessed isle… in some cynical, sceptical corners of the land…
Speaking of interesting ironies, permit me to sign off for this week or weekend with a few idle questions, ruminations, and speculations:
Now that the statistical quota has been taken care of, is it safe to fly again?
Will Malaysia Airlines survive not one, but two, disasters in the air?
Could lightning have struck the same place – or plane – twice?
Could MH17 with its allegedly blood-drained corpses (courtesy an uncredited report doings the rounds) be the very same MH370 that went missing without a trace (a la a more radical conspiracy theory)?
Is the sunny south of our blessed isle safe, again, for tourists as much as for local travellers?
Would justice have been done, and been seen to be done, and done for the sake of justice in itself as an end and not a means to an end – if not for the prestige of the Commonwealth chair? the pressure exerted by the surprisingly insistent Bonnie Prince Charlie? and the relative political expendability of a rampaging provincial yahoo’s reputation as measured by a sentence that is sure (sooner than later, as sure as lightning hits the same beached aircraft twice) to be suspended or mitigated or ameliorated?
We tremble. Our whole foundations shake. We have been zapped – and not for the first time…