By Rafia Zakaria
The
air was already heavy with tragedy and portent.
On Friday, PK-8303 took off from Lahore,
Pakistanis weary and worn after a month of fasting and lockdowns had only just
begun thinking about Eid Al-Fitr, a small glimmer of hope in a long journey of
tribulation.
The flight itself, one of the very first
permitted, was largely carrying people traveling home to their families for the
celebration. It took off at around 1 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, the venerated
last Friday of Ramadan when the faithful pray and ask for all they want in the
coming year. There were about 100 people onboard the Airbus 320– roughly half
of the plane’s usual capacity.
We all know the sordid events that unfolded
next. As the plane neared Karachi airport, there were problems on the flight
deck. One of them appeared to be that the landing gear was not opening.
According to an Airbus 320 pilot I spoke with, this is a very unusual and
unlikely problem, but nevertheless it is what is indicated by communications
that the pilot had with air traffic controllers at Jinnah Airport.
That conversation, available online, is a
chilling one. Unbeknown to most people, several freely available apps provide
live transmission of the conversations of air traffic controllers and pilots at
nearly every airport around the world. The short recording of the pilot
speaking with the control tower does not betray the extent of the drama that
was unfolding. But then, pilots are trained to be calm.
As someone who grew up in that stretch of flight
path leading up to Karachi Airport, it was chilling to hear about the plane
crash. As children we were used to jets flying overhead and often saw the
landing gear emerge from the bellies of planes flying at low altitude, looming
large. Sometimes we dreamt they crashed into our house– but we never imagined
it could actually happen. That a huge plane could fall out of the sky seemed to
be only the stuff of nightmares.
The crash of
PK-8303 has been just that– a terrible nightmare. One friend mourned the loss
of a co-worker and his entire family. These people suddenly, inexplicably lost
their lives owing to events that are still not entirely clear.
An Airbus 320 is a highly automated aircraft; it does not ordinarily
malfunction and fail to deploy its landing gear. Even if it did, the gear can
be released in a variety of other ways. According to one of the two survivors,
the pilot tried to land and failed at least once, and then warned passengers
that they were approaching a problematic landing.
I recount all these facts because the parameters of trauma surrounding an
airplane crash are not limited to the victims and their families. There is
something about the details of airplane travel– the packing, anticipation,
rush to the airport, the text messages sent to family and friends once the
plane is ready to take off– all of it makes up the drama of relatable air
travel.
Some of the world’s deadliest militant attacks have involved airplanes– rammed
into sky scrapers, shot down and hijacked. Statistically, airplane travel is
supposed to be much safer than any other means of transportation and this
detail would provide some solace were it not for the fact that tragedies
involving airplanes have always been so astoundingly devastating.
It is impossible
not to think of the unassuming souls onboard when one considers a plane crash.
What did they say to their loved ones? Were there people on the flight who had
decided to go at the last minute? Were there people who had decided not to go?
All the thoughts that wander through our minds as we read the details of this
crash, of the lives of the victims and of the miraculous survivors– all will
be remembered and revived when we get on planes in the near future. All of it
will add to our anxieties when we or anyone we love sets out to catch a
flight.
The more recent the memory of a terrible disaster like this one, the more
difficult all our next flights will be.
The anxiety of this tragedy added to the general uncertainty and rising death
tolls from COVID-19 and an Eid largely spent in lockdown, have cast a dark mood
over the country.
It is impossible to erase the trauma of having watched or read about a plane crash
or a pandemic, but realizing that the trauma inflicted by these kinds of events
is real and worth taking seriously is within our power.
To know that the mental health consequences of sad and sudden events are not
diminished because we were not individually affected, allows us to be better at
tending to each other and to ourselves. Anxieties and fears brought to light
tend not to survive; we cannot change the events that lead to them, but we can
treat the wounds they leave with compassion.
That, then, is the task before a very traumatized Pakistan in a pandemic-ridden
world.
(Rafia Zakaria is the author of “The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan” and “Veil.” She writes regularly for The Guardian, the Boston Review, the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review and many other publications.Twitter: @rafiazakaria)
